by Larry Brown
Miss Muffett actually liked the squirrel and even enjoyed feeding the squirrel and she would often put out nuts for it, sometimes Jiffy peanut butter on jar lids. It seemed to like crunchy best.
She walked out the back door in a real bad mood to feed the squirrel some pre-Christmas brazil nuts that were on sale and looked down and saw a small piece of rectangular glass lying in the yard and heard familiar yapping and looked up high in the tree and higher until she gasped and fainted dead away, toppled gently over into the deeply mulched flower beds, good thing no sharp bricks were poking up in a border like some folks have. Might have messed her up.
39
Arthur dozed off in the waiting room and had to be roused by a nurse, who took him back to an examining room. There was a long wait, but he finally got seen.
“Looks like a blood-flow problem to me,” the doctor said in his office after the examination, leaning back in his rich leather chair, pouring a double shot of Stolichnaya over big square ice blocks in a crystal glass on his desk. He went ahead and lit up a Doral Light, too. The walls were paneled with good dark wood and there were pictures of his smiling grandchildren on them. One was riding a spotted pony while the doctor held the halter.
“What are you saying?” Arthur said.
“Jesus,” the doctor said. “All I’m saying is all last week I was getting up at two A.M. to take a whiz after a couple of pops.”
Arthur waited politely. He wondered what Helen was doing now.
“Because I’m old, too, you know?” the doctor said. He sipped his drink. An intercom on his desk said something garbled. He turned a knob and it quieted. He raised his tired old eyes over the glass and looked morosely across the desk.
“How much do you expect at your age without some help? You’re not some young bull full of piss and vinegar, you know. You ever heard the term ‘slowing down’? Or ‘getting old’?”
“I still have desire,” Arthur said. “So does Helen.”
The doctor took such a large drink that he almost choked. He made a few KAFF, KAFF sounds, then cleared his throat, sucked in a lungful of smoke, blew it out.
“Whew. Don’t we all,” he said. “Don’t we all. A hard penis is nothing but one that’s full of blood, Arthur. And we have a blood-flow problem here. That’s about as simply as I can explain it, being a doctor. Now, you don’t want to go on Viagra because you say it makes you feel unmanly. You don’t want to schedule your sex because you’re uncomfortable with that. I can go with that, even if I don’t accept it as valid. But my God. Patients, without the benefit of attending eight years of medical school, always know so much about themselves and their conditions that it continues to astound me daily.”
“But…?”
The doctor held up the cigarette hand, which trailed smoke.
“Will you let me finish? Please?”
Arthur sat quietly. Like a lamb before the slaughter.
“Now. I can fix you up with a good pump.”
“A good pump.”
“Yes.”
“A good dick pump, you mean,” Arthur said bitterly.
The doctor sighed. He set his glass down and picked up the phone and punched a number and waited for it to ring while he took quick furtive puffs off his smoke. He spoke into it. He lowered his head. He asked a question. He muttered some things into it that sounded like model numbers. He said Fine, fine, then Thank you, and hung up. Then he stood up.
“It’s your lucky day, Arthur, we’ve got some in stock. You can pick it up and pay the girl out front. I take all major credit cards.”
“How do I know that’s what I want?” Arthur said.
“It’s either this or Viagra or reconsider some type of surgery.”
“No!” Arthur said.
“No need to get all hot about it,” the doctor said.
“I’m not hot,” Arthur said. “I’m just…” He stopped. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”
“You’re a normal human male, Arthur. Who’s getting up there a little in years. Who has a wife who’s a good bit younger than him. You have to have some help. Why do you think they make these things? Because it’s a common problem. That’s your key word right there, ‘common.’”
Arthur was afraid he was in for a lecture now. Once the doctor got on a roll, he could just keep on going. You didn’t want him to get started on arteriosclerosis or the black plague.
“Okay. So it’s common. But knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Don’t be bitter, Arthur. Now, I’ve got some company brochures here if you’d like to take one with you. Of course there’ll be one in the packet explaining how to use the pump. It’s pretty self-explanatory actually. You just stick it in and…”
Arthur thought about it for a few seconds.
“How much is this thing going to cost me anyway? I just paid fifty bucks to a kid to get a cat caught.” He didn’t mention the fifty bucks to the beautiful young stripper.
“To do a what what?” the doctor said.
“It’s a long story. I’m just trying to do something to make Helen happy.”
The doctor smirked then and took another drink and puffed on his cigarette some more.
“Arthur, you take this thing home and you’ll make Helen happy, believe me. It’s three or four hundred, plus tax.”
The doctor waited. He seemed about to make a shooing gesture.
“I’ve got other patients today, Arthur. Do you want the brochure or not?”
“I guess so,” Arthur said, and got out of his chair. The doctor reached into a pile of pamphlets that were scattered on the corner of his desk and handed one to him. There was a picture on the front of a white-haired couple riding horses on a beach. The picture was in color. Shallow waves were rolling in behind them. They looked slightly happy. The man seemed stoic and looked virile for his age. The woman looked like she might not be the most amazing fuck on the whole beach. They were wearing sweaters and jeans and they were barefoot, riding the horses, which were wearing saddles. To Arthur there was an unspoken yet grim message in the picture of some older people in trouble who were hiding it from the world but gamely trying to do something about it. He realized that they were like him. But not like Helen. She didn’t fit into that picture. It seemed so awfully scary to him that he put the pamphlet in his pocket quickly.
“Let me know how it goes,” the doctor said. He turned up his glass and winked at him, and Arthur booked for a fat man’s ass on out of there.
40
Domino was in a holding cell in jail, where the female deputy sheriff had dropped him off and filled out forms while the intellectual-looking guy he’d tried to carjack sipped coffee in the lounge as he told the other police officers what had happened. Domino had heard and seen some of it. They made the guy he’d tried to carjack tell it several times and he told it exactly the same way each time and then they left him alone and told him to get himself some more coffee and that they had some fresh chocolate doughnuts, too, and that they were sorry about the bullet holes in his minivan, but that he’d have to leave it with them, and then after their investigation was complete, they’d get it towed to the shop for him and let him know when it was ready, and then after a while the guy he’d tried to carjack said he figured his insurance company would probably furnish him with another car since what happened was probably covered, and then he and the female deputy sheriff left together. All this happened after the crime scene investigation itself, out on the road at the scene of the interrupted carjacking, while Domino waited in the back of a warm patrol car handcuffed and bloody and sick with worry and hurting like shit with knots all over his head. They were holding Domino until they could figure out what all he’d done. They definitely had him for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and attempted carjacking, but so far Domino hadn’t said anything. He was just keeping his mouth shut, just waiting for that one phone call he knew he was allowed. His head was scabbed up and swollen and they really hadn’t given him the proper med
ical attention as of yet. He knew they’d have to sometime. Maybe he could escape then. Maybe he could just run. There wouldn’t be a thing to lose by trying. If they found the cop. If they found the truck. If the meat thawed out. Yeah, he needed to make a call.
The only thing was, he didn’t know who to call. He didn’t know any lawyers. He didn’t have any friends. He guessed he’d just wait and see what happened. It didn’t look like there was anything else to do. It didn’t look like he’d be able to escape from here. The thing he happened to be in at the moment looked like it would be pretty escape-proof unless you had some high-speed hacksaws or maybe an acetylene torch or Harry Houdini in there with you to give you some pointers.
They’d be out looking around in the country down there. They’d find that junky fucking cruiser. Maybe they already had.
There was a big cop in a suit out there, one who had come in later extremely pissed off and who’d been trying to get him to talk. Even now he was just sitting there sipping a Pepsi, watching him through the holding-cell bars. He looked like a mean motor scooter, too. And he was just staring at him.
Domino leaned back against the painted block wall. There was a bunk but it wasn’t big enough to lie down on. He wasn’t going to say anything. That was how people got in trouble. They talked. They signed things. They applied for credit instead of paying cash. He knew how the world worked. Or he was pretty sure he did. But who in the hell was that in the garbage bag?
The plainclothes cop got up. He walked slowly down the hall, toward the holding cell. Domino could hear his feet on the tiles. He stopped in front of the cell and stood there. Great big son of a bitch.
“Still don’t want to talk?” He sipped some more of his Pepsi and belched.
Domino didn’t say anything.
“You will,” the cop said calmly. “You’ll sing like a yeller canary gettin’ his guts mashed out his asshole when I get done with you.”
He took the last drink from his Pepsi, turned, walked back up the hall, dropped his can into the trash, and picked up a ring of keys from a desk.
He was kind of far away, but Domino could hear him fine. And he noticed then that he hadn’t seen any other cops for a while. He hadn’t noticed any of them leaving, but it seemed it was just the two of them there now. He wasn’t sure at all how that had happened.
“You know why, you piece a shit?”
Domino didn’t make a sound. Quiet as a mouse. Or a cat.
“’Cause my name’s Rico Perkins. And my little brother’s name’s Elwood. We cain’t raise him on his radio, but he’s got a gun exactly like the one we took off you. He’s a constable. But I’ll bet you already know that. ’Cause I think you done met him.”
And he started walking closer. Domino didn’t say anything. But he could see the family resemblance right away. This guy was taller, though.
41
Anjalee’s hair was spread on a pillow and she lay on her belly with one nice leg bent and the other one straight, her eyes closed, her breathing regular and steady, her breasts flattened beneath her, half the sheet barely covering the simple naked beauty of her lovely ass.
Outside the room there were dim sounds in the hall, women talking, knocking on doors sometimes, vacuums running. Doors were opening and closing. The hall elevator sometimes ching ed.
Cars and buses and vans and trucks passed below in the streets, the noise of their horns and exhaust muffled by distance.
She turned onto her side and pulled some more of the satin sheet over her and held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart and in her sleep said very clearly: “That damn baloney was that thick.”
42
Some neighbor must have heard the dog yapping up in the tree and called 911 while Miss Muffett was fainted out, because here came the Como Volunteer Fire Department from their station right across the street from the steak house. Sirens howling, lights flashing, red trucks with gold letters and hoses and ladders in the driveway, guys in turnouts drinking coffee in foam cups, guys wandering around the yard in black boots with yellow toes helping Miss Muffett up and talking on those portable radios. A few of them had made the emergency run to the house six months earlier to extricate bloody Mr. Hamburger from the bloody posthole-digger incident in the backyard that day. But there was a different tactical problem for them now. The little dog was about fifty feet up. Or maybe sixty. It was a big tree. He was up there checking out the birds, like an ornithologist.
CVFD didn’t own a one-hundred-foot aerial platform like Memphis or Oxford, but there was a fire-equipment dealer in Southaven named Shed Roberts who just happened to have one in his parking lot that was in the process of getting gold letters put on it before it got delivered to the Memphis Fire Department. Some of the Como firefighters sometimes played poker and drank whiskey with Shed or had steaks at the Como steak house with him on his company tab, and one of them had seen the ladder sitting there coming back from a strip club in Memphis the night before, and one of the firefighters told Miss Muffett that Shed was more than glad to drive it down once they called him just because he loved playing with the things, and would have had one in his yard to scrape his house and paint it and clean the leaves out of his rain gutters or even put Santa and some fake reindeer on the roof if he could have afforded it, since a good one ran about $645,000 plus tax and delivery from the factory up in Pennsylvania.
They maneuvered the bucket platform with two truckies riding in it through the branches of the sycamore, which was leafless since it was winter, which made it easier for them to get it close. One truckie clipped a safety line to his waist and opened a narrow gate in the bucket, and while his partner held on to the waistband of his smoked-up turnout pants, stepped out into the air, reached for the little dog, and got him.
A small clutch of neighbors had gathered, a few old folks, some kids in coats, also a television crew from WTVA-9 in Tupelo that had been cruising down I-55 and had followed the ladder in since Shed had been running the red lights and blowing the air horn just for the fun of it, and a weak cheer went up as the ladder started retracting down to its bed on the engine, which was parked in the driveway, really humming and roaring, making all kinds of racket.
The Tupelo TV folks wanted an interview, probably hoping they could get it on the news as a human-interest story that night, but Miss Muffett didn’t want her plastic leg to be on TV and she didn’t want anybody to tell Mr. Hamburger that they’d seen his dog on TV because he’d jumped into a tree because she hadn’t left him any water in his pan. She took the little dog and went inside and shut the door. Then she peeked out the curtain to see if they were still waiting. Hell yeah. Like a bunch of vultures.
43
Helen was sitting at the dressing table in her bedroom, putting on some makeup, fixing her hair, sipping on a drink. Arthur had given up trying to talk to her through the locked door but had yelled through it that he was going to call the doctor right now and see if he could fit him in today but she didn’t really care anymore. She was trying to apply her lipstick. If he hadn’t had all that money, she never would have married him. It was a mistake and she could see that now. The horrible thing was that it had taken so long. She’d given him twenty years and she wasn’t going to get those twenty years back. But what the hell had she been thinking twenty years ago? Nothing. Not about the future, that was for sure. Only about how easy life would be. No more waiting tables. No more taking care of a bunch of drunks in the Union bar every night. No more worrying about how you pay the light bill this month.
She was going out for a while and when she came in she’d just tell him the truth, which was that she’d made a mistake, and yeah, had married him because he was rich, but that there wasn’t any need in compounding it by letting it go on any longer. She’d tell him she wanted a divorce, and that she wanted the Jag, and some money, and he could keep this house. A house was nothing. A house was just wood and wallpaper and you filled it up with deer heads and doilies. You could have one of them anywhere. Any mountain, any mead
ow. In Montana you could.
She’d go back home and start over. She’d invest her part of the money once she got it and live off it the same way he’d been doing all these years. She’d find a house in Montana or build one, one made from logs, with a sloped red roof and lots of glass and that would sit in the back of a field of yellow grass in the fall at the foot of a gray cliff that was two hundred feet high. Maybe find a man who could give her a baby. She wasn’t too old. Forty wasn’t too old. She’d seen in People magazine where Beverly D’Angelo had married Al Pacino and had given him twins and she was over forty. And her mother had a cousin in Idaho who raised potatoes with her husband and had a baby when she was forty-three. She’d read somewhere that some woman in India had delivered a healthy baby at the age of sixty-seven. So it wasn’t impossible. She was going to tell him. It wasn’t like she hadn’t almost done it twenty times already. But last night had been the final straw. If he wasn’t going to even try to get any help, if he couldn’t even make love to her, if she didn’t even have that, and had to find it with other men, and especially an asshole like Ken, then there wasn’t any need in staying any longer.
