by Robin Beeman
“Speak very slowly,” said the voice at the other end. “My English is not yet good, but I want to understand what you are saying.”
Secrets
COOPER’S DOG was dying. It didn’t seem to be in agony, but Cooper knew it was time to call the vet. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone. If Cooper’s father had been alive, the man would have gone outside, taken a shovel to the earth, dug a grave, brought the dog out, looked it in the eye, muttered something to it, and then put a bullet in its head. Southerners like his father knew about the bond between men and dogs. They knew that part of being a dog’s master meant taking on life and death responsibilities.
But Cooper didn’t even own a gun. No one he knew hunted. And he was embarrassed to ask his friends if they had a gun to offer him because he had the sort of friends who wouldn’t admit to owning guns even if they did.
Cooper and his former wife had attended his father as he wasted away from lung cancer. They had waited with his father as the man’s flesh moved closer to the bone—waited, watching him pull in cigarette smoke and then cough it out. Cooper’s father smoked his last days away—smoked and looked out of the bedroom window at the winter field and the woods beyond, at the monochromatic grays of overcast sky and leafless tree scaffolds, oak on the high side, cypress on the low.
They tried to get his father to eat chicken gumbo with okra, his favorite dish, cooked by Roseanna, the black woman from down the road who came in once a week to clean a little and cook gumbos, and étouffées, and bisques, and fried greens with salt pork, meals only Cooper and Janet ate until there was no more and Roseanna appeared again.
Smells from the old wood-frame Louisiana house also came back to Cooper—smells of the spices of the food and the resinous pine and oak burned in the fireplaces because the gas heat made his father gasp for air. And with those, the background smell of urine. The dog seemed to hate his own incontinence as much as Cooper’s father had hated his. Tic-Tok left small puddles halfway to the newspaper, and these puddles, which Cooper cleaned and then wiped with white vinegar, sent pungent salty urine signals that Cooper associated with things being not as they should.
Cooper and Janet had let the dogs in every day for a visit to his father, the spotted bird dogs, twisting and panting around the legs of the bed, always damp, smelling of the fields, the woods, the distant outdoor places his father studied from the remove of his bed. And Tic-Tok, who had been a spoiled house dog in California, had to stay outside with his father’s dogs in Louisiana, because dogs belonged outside, and when he came in with the other dogs for the daily visit he hated having to go outside again.
Tic-Tok was a mutt with maybe some Labrador, some Shepherd, some Dalmatian—not the sort of dog his father would have had. Although Cooper’s father had liked Tic-Tok well enough, had taken burrs and ticks from the dog’s coat after they’d walked across the hills of Marin when his father came to visit that one time.
Now Tic-Tok, the dog he and Janet had gotten from a box outside of a supermarket fifteen years ago when they’d both been students in Berkeley, was dying.
And as things would have it, yesterday he’d run into Janet. Right on Telegraph Avenue. As if seven years hadn’t passed. She’d put on a little weight—not much—and she looked pretty, and he had a hard time at first remembering that he’d been married to her once, that she wasn’t just an old friend whom he’d come across and was happy to see. She’d moved back to California a year ago and was living near Carmel and was in Berkeley visiting friends that day, people Cooper barely recalled and never saw. After a bit, she asked about the dog, almost as an afterthought, and he had to tell her that Tic-Tok was dragging himself around, not spending much time away from the pile of blankets, that his eyes were almost blinded by cataracts, that his kidneys were shot, and that it was just a matter of time.
“Oh, my God!” she’d said. “Oh, poor Tic-Tok.” And then with the matter-of-factness he so often found disturbing in her but which had been comforting back when she changed his father’s diapers, she said, “Pets outlive relationships, you know. They’re usually a mistake. I left my dog with my parents when I went to school, and I left Tic-Tok with you. Just don’t let him suffer.”
“No,” Cooper had said, suddenly shaky. “No. I won’t.” And then he said, “Well, would you like to see him before . . . ?”
“I don’t know if I should, you know. For myself, I mean. I don’t want to feel bad about things I’d almost forgotten.”
“Well, he’ll remember you. It might be nice to have a little whiff of you before he goes off to dog heaven.”
She’d given him a strange look, as if he had taken leave of his senses, which then changed to a look that said that she should have remembered that Cooper was that sort of person. “Where do you live? I’ll have some time tomorrow.”
“I took him to the vet last week,” Cooper said as soon as Janet entered. “He said Tic-Tok was going fast . . . and he offered to . . . you know, put him out of his misery. But I just couldn’t. . . .” He stumbled and paused and felt that things should be clearly presented to Janet, but he didn’t want to get into something emotional with her. He could feel her mind working as she looked around his cluttered, not-too-clean house, examining his paintings on the walls, the table where he had been doing watercolors—a medium he hadn’t worked in when they’d been together.
“I’m teaching art in high school,” he said. “It’s a terribly poor neighborhood, down by the tracks in flatland, but a few of the kids really respond.”
“Do you have time for your own work?”
“Not much. That’s why I’m doing watercolors. Working wet on wet. I have to paint fast. They’re a good thing for a person who doesn’t have much time.”
“They’re nice,” she said. She went over and looked. She touched the top painting, a misty Impressionistic landscape. She looked at the one under it, which was very much the same, a variation on the theme, and then didn’t inspect more. He wasn’t sure if she was incurious or being respectful of his privacy.
“He’s in the bedroom.”
“Do you live alone?”
“Yes,” he said and then felt that she had gone too far, though it was a simple question. He began to wonder about having asked her here. She, as usual, had been skeptical of this visit right off, but he hadn’t realized all the potential land mines until she stepped through the door. “He spends most of his time on an old electric blanket. I don’t know if he’s cold, but he shivers a lot.”
“Oh, Tic-Tok,” she said and went into the bedroom and knelt by the dog who did seem to recognize her, pounding his tail against the floor, lifting his head, whimpering, and trying to get to his feet, his paws sliding out from under him, his nails trying to claw some purchase on the wood. “Oh, poor Tic-Tok,” she said, “poor old Tic-Tok.”
“I don’t think he’s really in pain,” Cooper said, kneeling beside Janet.
“No, but he’s definitely failing. Why didn’t you have the vet put him away? Why are you keeping him like this?”
“If my father were here, he’d shoot him.”
Janet leaned back, sat on her heels, and appeared to think about this. “That’s what he’d do,” she said finally. “Well, you could do that.”
“I don’t have a gun,” Cooper said. He stretched his hand out to the dog’s tan shoulder. It made him uneasy talking like this in front of Tic-Tok. He wondered why he’d brought up the gun thing.
“I have a thirty-eight in the car. It’s a short-barreled revolver. Very easy to use. You can borrow it.”
“You have a gun?” Cooper asked.
“My husband makes me carry it in the car,” she said. “He was in Vietnam. While we were marching around here protesting, he was getting shot at. He believes in self-defense.”
“Oh,” Cooper said.
“He’s very bright. He teaches at the language school in Monterey. It’s sort of a spy school. Do you know the first thing they teach you to say in the language you
’re learning?”
“Well, probably not ‘peace.’ ”
“No.” She laughed an abrupt laugh to signal she’d gotten the joke and studied Cooper with the same slide show of expressions on her face as yesterday when he’d mentioned “dog heaven.”
“They teach you to say, ‘Don’t shoot. I know secrets.’ ”
She left as briskly as she’d entered—circumspect, avoiding any contact other than a handshake—and she came back for a minute with the gun and placed it in its leather holster on the kitchen counter next to half a can of Alpo that he’d been diluting with broth. She usually kept the gun in the glove compartment, she told him, but she’d do without it. This was more important. She’d be back up in a week for some workshop in investing and she’d get it then. She was doing that now. Telling people what to do with their money. He could picture her, brisk and practical in one of those gray suits with a taupe blouse that all the women seemed to wear who worked in the financial district. MBA nuns, a friend had called them.
After Janet left, Cooper went back into the bedroom and was surprised to realize that he longed for a cigarette, though he’d quit smoking for good a month after his father’s death. Tic-Tok had managed to sit up, listing a little to one side, but up. He slapped his tail on the floor when Cooper came in and looked more alert than he had for days. Maybe Janet’s visit had done something for the dog, or, maybe, and this thought distressed Cooper, the dog was aware of the gun in the kitchen and was trying to let Cooper know that he wasn’t ready to go yet. He was making an awful effort to look as if he was just resting between runs, that he could still fetch a stick or leap for a Frisbee, a trick Cooper had delighted in teaching him. All of these canine efforts at good cheer made Cooper miserable.
Cooper remembered walking into his father’s bedroom one time after a week of the man’s steady decline to find his father sitting up, a cigarette in one hand, another burning in the ashtray. His father, usually calm, was fidgeting and edgy. He got Cooper to help him stand and walk to the window to look out at the view he saw every day. Then he made Cooper support him for a walk through the house, something he hadn’t done for weeks.
In the living room, his father had turned around slowly and then asked Cooper where he was. Cooper told him that they were in the living room. It was the house they’d moved into when Cooper was six. The place was old, built in the last century in a then-popular style called dogtrot because of the breezeway running through the center onto which the rooms opened. When they moved in, Cooper’s father had the breezeway enclosed to create a wide hall. The kitchen occupied a wing off the rear. Sometime shortly after the move, Cooper’s mother died from a stroke, an unusual thing for such a young person, and Roseanna started coming in to take care of Cooper and his father.
Cooper’s father had stood on the rag rug in the center of the room and pivoted on his wobbling knees and said, “Don’t lie to me, boy. I’m in someone else’s house.”
“No sir,” Cooper had said, puzzled because this was the first time his father had ever been confused. “This is your house. It’s the house Uncle Wade left you. This is where I grew up.”
“Don’t lie to me, boy,” his father said, angry and shaking as he hung onto Cooper’s arm. “I know where I am and where I’m not.” Then tears started to run from his father’s eyes, large tears that fell onto the floor. His father didn’t sob or make any crying sounds. He just let these large tears fall as Cooper turned him back to the hall and walked him to the bedroom. Once in bed with the familiar view again, the man seemed to relax a little. He stopped crying. As he leaned onto the pillows and Cooper brought up the covers, his father said, “You know, there’s a lot I’ve never told you.”
“Yes sir,” Cooper said, “I expect there is.”
His father then lit another cigarette and studied the world beyond the window. He didn’t get up to walk around again and he didn’t question where he was. In fact, he hardly spoke. In three days he was dead.
Often, since that afternoon, Cooper had wondered why he hadn’t asked his father what it was his father hadn’t told him. He wondered why he had shied away from asking his father some question that would have prolonged that conversation. What had he been reluctant to hear then, that afternoon, with the smell of cigarette smoke and wood smoke in the air? What could his father have wanted to say?
His father could, perhaps, have told his son of another life he’d led, a life he’d never revealed. There were stories of such death-bed confessions. Cooper has tried to imagine his father leaning forward, regaining his color through the vivid palette of memory as he whispered of infidelities into his son’s ear.
Cooper has also considered that his father might have wanted to recount ways in which Cooper had managed to fall short of certain standards and failed to meet expectations. There had been an incident one autumn when Cooper was fourteen and he’d gone with two cousins on his first coon hunt. Cooper loved the dogs, the lanky black-and-tans, and he’d been almost feverish with excitement as they drove up into Mississippi. They arrived after dark at a clearing in a woods to find other pickup trucks already there and waiting, the men with their guns passing in and out of the beams of light, the dogs still on the trucks, quivering in their cages.
Cooper followed the men who followed the dogs, the high clear hound voices—all of them thrashing between trees, getting soaked up to their knees in creeks. Whenever they’d paused, the headlamps they wore drilled minerlike tunnels into the blackness and there was always someone to hand him a flask.
He was reeling with whiskey and fatigue when the dogs finally treed a raccoon. While their lights fastened the animal, huge with anger—its eyes already distant with foreknowledge—the men argued whether to kill it on the branch or shoot it down for the dogs to fight. Finally, one of his cousins won the chance to bring it down.
Everyone agreed the shot was perfect as the live raccoon tumbled to the dogs. In the shadows, Cooper vomited. All of the way home, in the heated air of the cab, he kept smelling the rubbed-away vomit on his clothes. “My nose tells me that old Cooper lost it back there,” his younger cousin said.
“Shut up,” the older cousin, the one who’d made the much-praised shot, answered. “You’ll do better next time, Coop.” There had never been a next time. Cooper had always been sure that someone must have told his father about this and yet his father never mentioned it, though Cooper waited for him to bring it up.
Then, too, it was also possible that his father might have decided to share some new and fearful insight, some apprehension, with Cooper. He might have wanted to say that he’d had a glimpse into the abyss and seen nothing but darkness, no remedy of light.
But as he stood beside his father staring down into the weave of the blanket, Cooper had no list of pending truths or revelations. He just felt a need not to hear what his father had to say.
Cooper ran his hand from Tic-Tok’s head along his back to his tail and scratched the spot just at the base of the spine. The dog relaxed, lay down, and then closed his eyes. Cooper continued scratching and was pleased to see that Tic-Tok was enjoying this enough to slap his tail once on the floor.
When the dog was asleep, Cooper went to the kitchen to put on water for coffee. He was starting a new unit tomorrow with his beginning class. It was going to be a sculpture project and the students were supposed to bring things from their homes that were going to be thrown away. He planned to gather his own collection of refuse for a demonstration and for the kids who invariably forgot the assignment and arrived empty handed.
As soon as he entered the kitchen, there was the gun. He had never had a gun in his house before, and its solid metal presence on the white-and-yellow speckled Formica counter, beside the Alpo, in front of the glass canisters filled with sugar, flour, and coffee—just one more domestic object—gave Cooper a sense of vertigo.
He did not normally drink by himself, but he had a bottle of Jack Daniels in a cabinet. He reached over the gun, opened the cabinet, and took out
the bottle and a glass, poured several ounces, and sat on a stool to consider things. His father had always stated his belief in the advisability of spending some quiet time with a glass of whiskey before taking any actions that might recast the universe in unpredictable ways.
The hillside behind Cooper’s house rose sharply, its broken face covered with wide-leafed English ivy. He had neighbors above, below, and on either side—all people who he knew held sacrosanct the virtue of quiet. The sound of the gun would not pass unnoticed. With the whiskey making a warm spot beneath his lungs, he held the gun in his hand and felt its weight. It was a solid thing, an admirable example of form following function. He didn’t allow himself to think about Janet holding it.
He had always been good at hitting targets—darts, archery, shooting—when he was younger. But that had been years ago. He took a beer bottle out of the trash and brought it to the edge of the property and placed it on a stump against the backdrop of ivy. Then he walked back, turned, took aim. The light was fading but the glint of glass in the setting sun was enough.
The sound was deafening and the kick unexpected. His arm flew up as if it belonged to a puppet. It took him a moment to recover. Then he went over to the stump. The bottle had disappeared. He saw a bit of the paper label off to the right.
Back in the house he expected the phone to be ringing. He listened for the sound of a siren. He looked out of the window in the front to see a flashing red light. Nothing. There was no evidence that anyone had heard the shot.
Except in the bedroom. Tic-Tok had managed to crawl under the bed, leaving only a few inches of tail showing beyond the spread. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry, boy,” Cooper said and threw himself on the bed above the dog. He lay very still knowing the dog knew he was there, hoping to suck in, absorb like a sponge, the animal’s fears.
A few moments later, Cooper noticed he still had the gun in his hand. He released it gently onto the night table and went to sleep. Sometime later he woke up with the knowledge that things were worse. He turned on the light and saw Tic-Tok, on his side, legs up, the right hind paw scratching at something invisible. It seemed an involuntary action, something done without Tic-Tok’s approval, a spasm. Cooper rolled onto the floor and crawled next to the dog. “Tic-Tok, old boy,” he whispered into the dog’s ear. The dog’s eyes were open, but staring, unfocused. The dog’s breathing was rusty, an act done against itself. “Ohhh, Tic-Tok . . . Tic-Tok. . . .” he said. “I’m here, boy. I’m here.”
