Whippoorwill

by Joseph Monninger

  “People like to pick on someone. It makes them feel bigger or more important. I’ve seen it a lot lately. Danny’s situation made me see it.”

  Holly held out the M&M’s bag to me again.

  “I’m turning into a cow, swear to God,” she said. “Keep these away from me.”

  “Even if you beg?”

  “Especially if I beg. I’m going to grow out of everything I own.”

  We climbed the porch to the back door. Wally squirmed and yipped a little from his crate in the kitchen. I opened the door and told him I was home.

  I cleaned off our back porch after Holly’s brother picked her up around five. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but maybe it had to do with seeing the battery over at Danny’s house. I had gone out on the porch to say goodbye, and the weather was soft and warm and the sun seemed reluctant to set. So walking Wally out to his bathroom place, I lifted an old end table off the porch, and that seemed to set something free inside of me. I carried it down and put it in the driveway, out of the way, but where we could load it into a Dumpster or into the truck to take to the transfer station. Then I went back and carried down more junk. I tied Wally to the porch post so he could hang out with me.

  It was junk. I couldn’t blame it all on my mom. Some of it was car or motorcycle parts my dad had jammed there, and some of it belonged to me. I had three Hula-Hoops—all broken in some way—that I had been too lazy to discard. I had a cruddy bike that needed more repair than it was ever going to see in this world, and a swing set, half dismantled, that my father had wedged there to keep it out of the weather before he could erect it for me. That had been years before.

  The work made me warm, even though the temperature was in the fifties. I got into it and before long I had made a serious dent in the collected trash. When I walked down to the growing pile near the driveway, I observed that the house wasn’t too bad if you gave it a proper cleaning. The porch almost looked gracious—if you looked at it in a certain way—and I wondered how we had let it get so bad, how we had walked past it day in and day out without ever stopping to consider what we were doing. It made me uneasy to think that we had been so lazy or so blind about what we had done.

  I was sweeping the cleaned-off porch with the big push broom by the time my dad got home. He climbed out of his truck and looked around at the assembled junk, then up to the porch, then back to the junk.

  “You’ve been busy,” he said. “What got into you?”

  He bent down and petted Wally when he came up the steps. Wally stayed quiet and let him.

  “I got tired of looking at it, I guess.”

  “Well, it looks a heck of a lot better, doesn’t it?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Funny how things gang up in a spot.”

  “I didn’t fix anything for dinner. I got involved in this.”

  “That’s okay. We should have done this a long time ago, I suppose.”

  He put his things in the house and I heard him run water. I heard him crack a beer. He came out a few minutes later and took the broom from my hand. He put the beer on the railing and looked at me.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “School okay?”

  “It was okay.”

  “I worried about you today. But it went okay?”

  I nodded again.

  He put his arms around me and hugged me hard for a moment.

  “This is all going to be okay, you know,” he said. “All in the fullness of time. Time works, believe me.”

  “Yep.”

  “Just go slow.”

  “I will.”

  He let me go and then took a look at the porch.

  “We could paint this, you know. It would look a thousand times better with a coat of paint.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe this is our summer to clean up around here.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Then he swept, working the broom hard, while I used the big dustpan and scooped up the debris. We worked until we could hardly see anymore. A couple of fireflies came out and flashed, their signals burning like a hand holding a cigarette and waving goodbye.

  It might have been one night; it might have been a thousand nights.

  In my bedroom, I waved my hand across my waist.

  Wally sat.

  I made a down motion and he went on his belly, his eyes watching me. He had a new collar made from a colorful weave of black and red and a little purple. It looked great on him. I had shampooed him after his adventure on his own and his fur still glistened. He looked healthy and handsome. He was an impressive dog now that he was cleaned up. His rabies tag hung in the middle of his chest, a spot of silver on his black body. Dad had paid to make sure his shots were up to date.

  I pushed my hand at his eyes. “Stay,” I said.

  Then I walked away and he stayed where I left him. I watched him for a little while. He watched me.

  Eventually I squatted down, slapped my leg, and said, “Come.”

  He lumbered over into my arms, nearly knocking me down. Then I got him to sit next to me and I held him for a long time, my forehead against his chest, my arm over his back.

  I whispered to him that I loved him. I whispered that he was the best dog in the world. I called him a secret name, Gold Moon, because one night when I woke up feeling frightened, I saw the moon streaming in through my window and it reflected off Wally’s coat. For a second he didn’t seem like a dog. Or rather, he seemed better than a dog, seemed like the greatest dog that ever lived, and I whispered “Gold Moon” to him. It sounded corny and stupid, but the moon continued to move and light ran slowly down his body. It felt like all the planets and every single thing swirling in space had conspired to send that single ray of light through my window to find him. Like the universe’s flashlight. He stayed still, his head up, and looked at me, and I thought of him out on that pole, his body chilled with ice and vapor, and I imagined the light as his reward, as some sort of cosmic payment for his suffering. It had given him nobility, all that suffering, and I cried quietly watching him.

  But now in my room, I stayed next to Wally, and we didn’t do anything special. He was my dog.

  Twenty-One

  A DOG IS PART of heaven, Father Jasper says. A dog will lead you to heaven if you let him.

  Three weeks later we drove down to Concord on my dad’s motorcycle, because it was warm and sunny out and my dad couldn’t resist. I didn’t mind using the motorcycle, because I didn’t want to have to talk on the way down. My dad wasn’t certain it was a good idea that I see Danny, but I argued that I had to see him at some point, so why not now? If we had taken the truck, I knew, he would have felt the need to lecture me and tell me how to handle things, how to approach Danny, and I was grateful we could skip that.

  It was nice riding, anyway. I clung to my dad’s back and we drove at the speed limit and the Harley ran smooth and powerful beneath us. Spring was a thin line of warm days and I saw everything green and perfect on either side of I-93. We passed the Pemigewasset and the Merrimack, both of the rivers like flashes of bright rope, and for a while, over my dad’s shoulder, I watched a pair of red-tailed hawks circling. Being on the bike blocked everything. It was all sensation, all speed and impressions, and so when we finally turned into the parking lot of the Concord Correctional Facility, I felt like I was waking from a dream.

  “Pretty riding day,” Dad said, swinging off after me.

  I pulled off my helmet. I bent to check my hair. It stuck up like a broom.

  “How did the bike sound?” I asked, because he liked talking about the bike.

  “Sounded good. Better than it did last season.”

  “I won’t be long.”

  “I’m coming in with you, Clair.”

  “I need to do this on my own.”

  “It’s a prison. Lots of dirtbags in here.”

  “I know. I can handle it. I’ve handled Jebby all my life.”

  I meant it as a joke. I ha
nded him my helmet. He shook his head.

  “I’ll let you talk to Danny on your own, but I’m coming in to make sure things go okay. I’m not debating that, Clair.”

  I shrugged.

  We headed toward the building. All cinder block. All razor wire.

  We had to wait for lunch to finish. We sat in an ugly lobby on uncomfortable chairs and leafed through yellowed magazines. People came and went. Cops came and went. I heard a lot of keys, a lot of buzzing, a lot of loud talking. Someone had a television on in another part of the waiting room and we heard daytime talk shows and commercials. The commercials were always louder than the regular programming. The building bounced sound everywhere. It was like being inside a can.

  Sitting in the lobby, waiting and reading, I thought of Wally. I thought of how Wally had been on his chain, outside, alone. Prisons are posts in the ground where we tie up troublesome dogs. That’s what it felt like to me. It was pretty obvious, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  “Clair?” a woman asked.

  She wore squeaky shoes and a lanyard around her neck. She carried a clipboard.

  “Hi,” I said, standing.

  My dad stood too.

  “Here to see Danny Stewart, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. He’s been looking forward to it. I’m his caseworker. My name is Paula.”

  She shook hands with us both. She smiled. She must just have had her lunch, because her lipstick looked fresh and shiny, as if she had reapplied it recently. She had gray hair cut short and she wore sneakers. She looked like a gym teacher.

  Dad hugged me. Then I followed Paula past the check-in desk and into the cinder blocks.

  I didn’t know what to expect. Anything I knew about prison visits came from television. I thought I’d have to sit on one side of a Plexiglas window, Danny on the other, and we would speak through a phone, or a hole in the glass, and a bunch of other visitors would be doing the same thing on either side of us. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as all that.

  Paula led me into a small conference room, and she nodded at a guard on the other side of the room. That guard, a large man who had an enormous potbelly hanging over his belt, opened the door and held it back. A second later Danny stepped inside.

  “Hi, Clair,” he said.

  “Hi, Danny.”

  He wore an orange jump suit. His sideburns were gone.

  “Henry here is going to stay in the room while you two talk. No touching, thanks. No physical contact. If the conversation turns inappropriate, Henry will step in and end the visit. Is that clear? Danny, we talked about the ground rules. Keep them in mind. I’ll give you about a half-hour. If you don’t want to use the full half-hour, just tell Henry and he’ll call me. Does that make sense to everyone? We all on the same page? Is that clear?”

  I nodded. Danny nodded too.

  Paula left. Henry slumped against the door and crossed his arms. It felt weird to have to talk in front of him, but he didn’t seem to care about anything in the world.

  I pulled out a chair and sat. Danny sat. I felt lightheaded and slightly detached from my body. I felt like I was going to be sick. But then I took some deep breaths. I tried to focus on Danny.

  “How’s Wally doing?” Danny asked.

  “He’s great. He knows down-stay, stay, come, and sit, and, well, you know.”

  “Cool. I’m glad to hear that.”

  “I’m trying to get him to catch a Frisbee. It’s not easy. I’ve been working with him a lot, though.”

  “You can have my car,” he said in a non sequitur.

  It was Danny being nervous. I ignored it.

  “You okay?” I asked. “In here, I mean?”

  “Yep. It’s okay here. Not that bad.”

  “Will they keep you here, or transfer you someplace else?”

  “Not sure yet. My lawyer is working all that out.”

  “So you have a lawyer?”

  “State appointed.”

  “Good.”

  “Seriously, Clair, you can have my car. I’m not going to be using it for a long time.”

  “I don’t want your car, Danny.”

  “It’s going to sit and not be used. I’ll sell it to you for a dollar. If it’s still running when I get out, you can sell it back to me for a dollar.”

  “Doesn’t somebody in your family want it?”

  He looked down at the table. He appeared much younger without the sideburns. He had lost weight, too, and the jump suit swam all over him.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “My family isn’t all that interested in me at the moment. I don’t get a lot of visitors.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Will you think about it anyway?”

  I nodded. It was easier to go along with it than argue it out.

  “Okay, Danny.”

  Then we didn’t say anything. Henry, the guard, rubbed his back against the wall. It made a grating sound.

  “I don’t know why,” Danny said eventually. “I don’t know why I did it.”

  “You don’t have to explain anything.”

  “I kind of want to. But I don’t have an answer, Clair. It felt like I had a robot inside me and the robot was going to do whatever it wanted and I tried to shut it down, but it kept moving even when I told it to stop. I’ve got a counselor and that’s working okay. I’m talking it out with him. Some guys in the block, they say the devil gets inside people and makes them do bad things, but I don’t believe them.”

  “What’s going to happen to you? Do you know what your sentence might be?”

  “Not really. I’ve heard a whole range of things. It’s probably going to be attempted murder. I’m not counting on anything.”

  “I’m sorry about it all, Danny.”

  “No reason for you to be sorry, Clair. You were nice to me. You were nicer to me than any other person in my life. That’s the truth.”

  “It didn’t seem to help you much.”

  He shrugged. His hands jittered a little on his lap.

  “He threw some hot water at Wally. Hot water that he was boiling for his instant coffee,” he said. “I told him to stop it. He did it again just to be a jerk.”

  “And that started it?”

  “That was the first round. A little later he came up to my room and he grabbed me by the ear. I was in bed and half asleep and he kind of lifted me out of bed by the ear. He said to put the dog out. I had Wally fixed up in the kitchen on a blanket, but Dad got it into his head that the dog should be out. Then he let me go. So I went down and I put Wally out, and when I came back, Dad flicked hot water at me. He’d been drinking. He said I was just a dog too, and he had half a mind to tie me out with Wally. Something drunk and stupid like that. He kept flicking spoonfuls of hot water at me, so I tried to go past, to go to bed, and he grabbed me by the ear again and I swung at him.”

  “Sorry, Danny.”

  Danny looked at Henry. Then he looked back at me.

  “I guess I surprised him, because he lurched over to one side and slipped on the water. He knocked over a bunch of things and turned the kitchen table over. He went down hard, drunken hard, and then I lifted the car battery and dropped it on him. They’re trying to say I slammed it down on him, but I don’t think I did, Clair. I think I just dropped it on him.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Danny. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “He didn’t even have his hands up to protect himself. He was stunned, I suppose, to find himself on the floor. I dropped it on him and the corner of the battery hit him right above the brow and there was a ton of blood. So much blood.”

  I wanted to hold his hand, to do something to give him comfort, but that was against the rules.

  “I took off then. I went up to the P&H Truck Stop over in Vermont and I just drank coffee. Then I texted you about going somewhere and that was that. I tried to ignore it. I hoped it would go away.”

  “Who found your father?”

 
“He dialed nine-one-one himself. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. He woke up about midmorning and he said his son had tried to kill him. That’s why they came after us so hard.”

  “It freaked me out, I have to say. The cops, I mean.”

  “I know. I’m sorry about that. I just couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t do anything. I had such a good day with you and Wally that I pretended nothing had happened back home. Sorry, Clair. I know that wasn’t fair.”

  “It’s okay, Danny.”

  “Dad hasn’t been in touch. I don’t think he will get in touch.”

  I nodded.

  That was it. Paula came back a few minutes later. It didn’t feel as though a half-hour had passed. She still had her clipboard.

  “Sorry, guys,” she said. “Time’s up.”

  Danny stood. I stood too.

  “I’m learning to play the guitar,” he said on his way out. “The blues.”

  “Of course.”

  “Think about the car.”

  Then Henry closed the door and I followed Paula back to my father.

  “Okay?” Dad asked when I came back to the waiting room.

  I shrugged. Then I folded into him and couldn’t stop crying for a long time.

  About three weeks later a bill of sale came from the Concord prison conveying the car to me for the price of one dollar. Danny attached a note saying he would accept the dollar on credit. He provided the VIN. I realized, reading it, that he must have had the number memorized.

  When I showed the note from Danny to my dad, he shook his head. We had just finished dinner. He read it with his pair of glasses down on his nose. The reflection of the paper made his eyes look as though they were covered with Post-it notes.

  “We don’t want to get involved in all that,” he said, placing the note on the table. “Not until the dust settles and maybe not even then. I’m hearing that Elwood will be coming home pretty soon. We ought to let things go back to normal. As normal as they can be.”

  “His dad isn’t going to be on his side.”

  “You don’t know that, Clair. Look, it’s not good any way you slice it. It’s nice of Danny to think of you and to want to give you his car, but Danny’s not in a position to give things away.”