“I figured we could stay in a motel.”
“This the same woman whose property you’re trespassing on?”
Sanderson realized for the first time that she had called the cops on him. Couldn’t she have come out to shoo him away? He wanted badly to be angrier than he was. What was wrong with him this morning? He felt like lying down in the grass, going limp like a protester on television. He felt like letting his bones dissolve into an act of aggressive nonviolence and letting Officer Britt call a backup to help lift him onto a stretcher, upon which he would be carried out into the country by four burly cops, pallbearer silent and reverent, to a place where his domed tent rested in a spot by a creek. Officer Britt appeared very serious, as if he was trying to remember something, the rights he was about to read to Sanderson perhaps. What rights would those be?
“She told you I’m trespassing?”
“That’s what this is called, sir. She don’t want you here, it’s called trespassing. Why you want to block her in? She can’t even get out her driveway.”
“Oh, I’m not blocking her in. I mean, I know she’s blocked in, too, but that’s only because he’s parked behind her. He’s the one blocking her in. I’m blocking him in.”
“I’m not going to get into any of that. What I’m going to do right now is ask you to follow me over to my vehicle. Can you walk okay?”
“Of course I can walk.”
Officer Britt took Sanderson’s arm anyway. He led him over to the cruiser and delivered him into the backseat and asked for the car keys, which Sanderson said were in the ignition. He’d worn the battery down listening to an all-night talk radio show. This he had done deliberately, so he could not move the car even if asked, but Officer Britt managed to get the car started anyway, and Sanderson felt like crying as he watched his uncle’s car bounce into the street and come to a noisy rest by the curb in front of her house.
Officer Britt got out and went to the door. She answered his ring immediately, and as she asked him in he got a glimpse of her, dressed in one of his old T-shirts and a pair of pajama bottoms. He checked the windows to see if her lover was spying on him from another room but saw nothing at all but the earliest sun bouncing off the glass.
“I hate that sculpture,” said Sanderson to Officer Britt when he climbed back in the car with his clipboard. “Don’t you hate that sculpture right there?”
Officer Britt had donned a pair of glasses in order to complete his paperwork. He turned to look at Sanderson slumped in the backseat, then cut his eyes toward the work of art in question.
“She declined to press charges, Mr. Sanderson. But she’s going down to the station little later on to get a restraining order sworn out on you. You know what that means, Mr. Sanderson?”
“It means she loves me?”
Sanderson thought he heard Officer Britt laugh, but maybe it was himself he heard, and maybe it was the sound of some other emotion. He went ahead and smiled anyway, as if he had said something funny and people admired him for his ability to laugh away life’s unfairness.
“It means you are not to come within one hundred yards of her at any time. It means you are not to contact her, and you can’t be passing out in her driveway, and you can’t be acting like you acted last night.”
How else am I going to act, Sanderson wanted to ask. Just tell me this: what else am I supposed to do with this love? Where am I supposed to put it, now that she’s gone and found herself another lover? Sanderson managed to stop himself from saying such a pitiful thing, for he knew that to Officer Britt, to everyone else in the world, it was not love that made him act this way. He realized that to the rest of the world he was a sore loser, if not a plain old loser, and that to them, the only thing he was in love with was a misery of his own making.
But those people would not know real love if it came for them at daybreak, tapping a flashlight against their window, ordering them out of their vehicle, reading them their rights. Like the good officer Britt, who was asking Sanderson if he had someplace to go this morning.
But Sanderson, thinking he was bound to come too close to her and get himself busted, was thinking about his rights. Aside from the right to deny his love, which he’d already blown, it seemed he had no rights. There exists no protection for those left behind — the law sides with the leavers — and the only order he was bound by was the love he held on to even now. She might make it official that he could only love her from a distance, but so long as he did not abandon his love, there were no boundaries. What he did in its service — burn his house down, take a drink, block her lover’s pickup in her drive — was sanctioned by laws simpler and larger than the ones that had landed him in the back of this cruiser.
How could they use against him anything he said in the name of his love? Sanderson was halfway out with his story before he even knew what he was going to say, and it felt right to say it even to a cop.
“The last night she spent with me, I tricked her into coming over to my house. I called her up and told her I didn’t trust myself not to drink and would she come over there and sit with me for a while. She’d already mailed me my key back and I didn’t ask her for my key back, I didn’t want it back, I wanted her to keep it forever. Anyway, she rang the damn doorbell. I was lying in the bed, in the dark, and I hated hearing that doorbell ringing, while I was lying there in the dark, waiting for the woman I loved to come home to me, knowing I’d driven her away.”
Officer Britt put his clipboard on the dashboard of the cruiser, and Sanderson thought he heard him sigh, but it could have been the creak of his holster as he relaxed into the seat, it could have been, instead of a sigh, some sign that he wanted to hear what Sanderson had to say.
“She lay down next to me in bed and we were talking and I was telling her how I loved her and wanted her back and she was tired from work and after a while she fell asleep. I was just about as happy then, listening to her breathing in her sleep, as I’d ever been. I mean, I felt bad for how I got her to come over to the house, I wasn’t really all that in danger of drinking, no more than I’ve been since she left me, but I also felt so right to have her there in bed beside me, even though she had on all her clothes and her car keys were lying on the edge of the bed. I got up and put a blanket over her and she was dead asleep and after a while I fell asleep myself.”
“Mr. Sanderson,” said Officer Britt. “We need to get you squared away.”
“Sometime in the night, late, I woke up and I moved close to her and took her in my arms and she let me and we slept like that for a while, and then I started kissing her and at first she just froze, but then she started to kiss me back some and all of a sudden she sat right up in the bed and said, ‘I am not going to feel bad about this tomorrow, I’m not,’ and then she took off her clothes and we went at it.”
“Mr. Sanderson, I don’t care to hear the details of your love life with your former girlfriend. What I care to hear is where you want to go right now. I can’t let you stay here, you know.”
“I ain’t bragging, I don’t have anything to gain by lying to you. I already lost everything, can’t bring it back with lies. I’m telling you the truth, sir, nothing but. I did not give a damn about satisfying myself and it was the best love I’d ever made. I just concentrated on making her feel good so she’d see how capable I was after all, and it worked. You can tell, you know. It’s obvious when you’re satisfying the woman you love and for us men there’s no better feeling in this world. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Officer?”
“I hear you,” Officer Britt said reluctantly.
“I felt like everything was going to be fine then. She was making some serious noise, she wasn’t trying to hide it, how good it felt to be with me again, and then all of a sudden her cries turned to sobbing and I was holding her face in my hands and I will tell you what, Officer, I could of lived a thousand years without figuring out that her face was wet with tears and not sweat worked up from pleasure.”
Officer Britt was silent. He stared out
the window at the sculpture, and for a minute it seemed he was about to answer Sanderson’s question about whether he liked it, but then Sanderson started talking again and Officer Britt reached gently for the clipboard and put it on the seat next to him. He started the car, eased away from the curb. Sanderson, watching his uncle’s car slide out of sight, turned around for a last look at the house, but all he could see was the sculpture, which struck him in the weak light as monstrous, something evil he’d had a hand in creating. Sanderson felt his blood sugar dropping, his body begging for more booze, but he knew another drink would not take care of the emptiness he felt, as he’d given away some sacred private part of them to a stranger, a fucking cop.
“What I’m going to suggest is you get somebody to pick that car up for you, okay?” said Officer Britt. “I don’t want you coming back over here, even to pick up your car.”
“Just take me home,” said Sanderson when they were out of her neighborhood.
“I thought you said you burned your house down.”
“You aren’t going to arrest me for that?”
“Didn’t kill nobody, did you?”
“No.”
“Collect any insurance?”
Sanderson hadn’t gotten around to filing. It didn’t seem right, collecting money off a statement made by bottomless and eternal love. As Officer Britt drove him farther and farther away from her, Sanderson kept busy thinking about all the terrible things in this world that he would never, ever do.
Smoke from Chester Leading Me Down to See Dogman
UPSTAIRS I FOUND SMOKE in the pockets of my daddy’s striped shirts. Hovering in the mouths of his cowboy boots like steam coming off a cauldron. In my mama’s top two drawers, smoke up under her fold-in-private things. Smoke in my nostrils, smoke curling round the coils of my ears.
Smoke from the broiling steak that way downstairs they were calling Chester drove me to raise my hand like I had a question and search the dark hall for the cord to the hideaway steps. Bare-bulb attic light turned boxes marked CHRISTMAS, HATTERAS, and BRIC-A-BRAC: MANTELPIECE a chicken-skin yellow. Chester smoke rose from them. I sat down on HATTERAS and hugged the stooped me that hid there for a half hour, bent up under the eave slope, straddling the attic ribs. Dogman, dogman calling to me for the first time in weeks.
I was careful not to breathe too hard lest insulation get sucked up inside me. It happened before. Men came to insulate and I climbed up to watch them unroll the thick pink blankets like sleeping bags, me thinking, all right now, hide out from the craziness in the kitchen, camp out up under the eaves. A voice called me down out of the way and I obliged and this is when it happened, me standing at the foot of the ladder, my head flung back so far my mouth led straight to my belly. A stray tuft went right down me, disappeared inside.
Something like that, bring it back up, it cuts you twice, better just to live with it. It’s possible to go on ahead, carrying such inconveniences; lots of people got holes in their hearts they don’t even notice after a while. So after making noise about suing some company’s ass off, which they shut him up by saying should I have been allowed to wag-tail down there like a table-scrap dog, my daddy made best-insulated-belly-in the-world jokes at me for a month, the length of his memory even if you were to shoot him. And I didn’t even miss any school days, it happening in high summer, but that pink tuft I carry within.
Up rose the voice my mama uses when company comes, blue, curvy, beautiful to a fault. I waited until she’d quit calling to make my descent. Frontwards down the hinged ladder, Chester smoke thickening. Don’t plunge or you’ll get the bends, I told myself while climbing down, and this self-administered advice tickled my insulated belly, allowing smiles for everyone when I entered the kitchen.
Where there was smoke from Chester mixed with Tareyton and pot smoke, where there was glass sparkle, plates chinking, King Crimson on the tape player. Some lady with Cleopatra bangs pasted to her forehead played the spoons, the men in the room watching her knit skirt surf a fishnetted knee. Daddy pulled a wide knife from the slotted block it took him six Saturdays to make, everybody bunched up to see Chester sliced. My mama and daddy continue to work their way through this world in the back of restaurants because they say it’s the only type job where the laughter don’t come in a can. Half of the restaurant help shows up at our house weekly to dispose of items they decide are overstock.
Greasy oven door banging down: Chester! George the sous-chef leaped toward the ceiling, jerked the beaded cord of the exhaust fan. As it cranked up, smoke shifted above our heads like flute-charmed cobras. Before I gave up Dogman I would have felt excitement in a situation similar, as if I was part of a group of older people just about to move off somewhere together. But that was before I gave up Dogman and at age fifteen and some change discovered what it is about groups of people.
— Cut the music down, called Daddy, grinding his knife in whetstone swirls I could tell he thought sexy.
— What exactly is Chester? A drunk woman asked this. I knew she was drunk because her words managed to sound lazy and exuberant at the same time.
— If you mean what cut, technically I believe Chester is a London broil. Somebody down in front said this without turning around, words passed overhead like bodies on stretchers.
Waving back the crowd with his hot mat mitt, Daddy pulled the oven rack out as far as it’d go, letting Chester bask and steam, laying him out for the group of them who’d named their dinner just to have an inside joke to get them through the deep drift of upcoming Tuesdays at work. Even Mama seemed moved as she stared at Chester who rose from the pan like a steep-sided island, greasy seas boiling at the bottom of his cliffs. Daddy, thumbing black plastic spatulas, shoveled Chester onto a cutting board and sliced so professional skinny you know he went to school for it. He’s CIA, all the way up to Hyde Park, New York, to take his degree, though Mama, when she’s pissed, calls his alma mater Culinary Institute of Alabama instead of America, says he don’t know snail from doorstep slug.
Chester’s carved sides curled into the bubbly sea. Everything went grainy then, everyone had Dick Tracy dotted faces, corduroyed foreheads. Dogman, Dogman, loud and clear. They started to line up with their plates to their breasts like grade school or prison and before the first slice slapped plate I was out the door and half down the hill, smoke from Chester pushing and pulling me.
MY COUSIN MILLY’S the one took me up there first. Dogman’s always been so-so to her, take or leave, like cigs snuck in the bathroom during assembly. Though I have learned that people all the time take you to see things they don’t themselves appreciate nor understand. Museums for one. They’ll bus you over, snake you single file behind a teacher who’s looking only a water fountain that works. What do you owe those who bring you to places that touch or change you? Don’t owe them jack. They’re only vehicles, saggy camels delivering you to the sphinx. Ride them until they’re tongue-waggy, rub and chafe until their humps are threadbare as back-porch throw rugs, tweak their ears when you want down and when you dismount, don’t you even look back.
Milly knows this herself. Boys kept bringing her up to where Dogman’s supposed to roam, hoping she’d what? Fall willing under the spell of their clunky desires got up in man-dog costume and sent to prowl the ridges? Dogman the local Loch Ness monster, rivaled around here only by the Baby Bridge and the irrigation pond they raked for Floyd Japarks’s bloated corpse. Dogman standing in for the moonlit lane, the two Miller Lites, the skinny-dip, anything designed to introduce the friction. Dogman-as-aphrodisiac? It’s like thinking old Darwin’s seductive, which in a way his stuff sort of is, not that these boys would know Darwin’s stuff if it chased them down and bit them.
Driving up to see Dog that first time, Milly leans into her big idea boy, away from the door and the sidewalks just beyond, like the car’s hugging a constant curve. She wants to ask where he’s taking her but don’t. She’s heard talk of Dogman and wants to be a witness but yet you can’t come out and ask, you got to come up
on him.
Dogman’ll run from you as he lives and breathes.
Milly wants to say she’s seen him, but the boys taking her up there don’t have foremost in their minds the tracking down of Dogman. You have to know where to park and all. You got to learn to follow clotheslines through the head-high dark as if they were flashlight beams frozen for you. There’s a sixth-sense semaphore out there, a complicated taking into account of things: crosstown sirens bouncing like hailstones off the sides of barns and train whistles shaking trees. One short and two long caterpillars underfoot. Smell the crunched grass not yet sprung back up. It’s a question of putting yourself out there by turning yourself inside out, which most would not want to do even if they knew how.
One night Milly claims to see something. They’re rounding the switchback on one of those logging roads that fork off Japarks Drive and come up on something standing there in the muddy crook. Moonlight strikes the puddle he straddles. Milly’s fuzzed on details because she says the light loses out to the clouds as they watch, but when I doubt her to her face she comes up with something: drawn-up paw, cheek dribble, dangling tongue, drool-coated fang agleam. She describes at it, conjuring things I would have said myself if you asked me back then what he looked like.
She’s back up there lots with that same boy, but when they go for a good month or two without a sighting she exchanges him for a few more. Sometimes she claims to see Dog for a second or two but always when he’s running away or behind a tree. Like I said, it’s to Milly like shoplifting Sucrets or sneaking into the drive-in. She doesn’t need it. Soon as she gets her license, Uncle Houston gives her that castoff Astro to drive, Mill loads the front seat with her big-haired girlfriends and goes looking Dog like four nights a week. Suddenly above using love to get up that hill. Love changes shape when you pass your driving test and get given a car, even an Astro the greenish of bad teeth. For some, this is independence: a half ton of sprung seat and dangly rearview, life course sighted by a hood ornament. I might could feel this way myself had not Milly told me about Dogman, had I not been born knowing what’s a vehicle and what teaches you things.
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