by Ann Pancake
Dell lifts his face, squints, and frowns, even though the cracks are as visible as the grandchildren’s coloring book pages on the freezer door. “Huh. I can’t see nothing,” Dell says.
For some seconds, the only sound is Becky’s fist, a hishing against the denim of her thigh. Then Kenny blurts breath in disgust. He thrusts the wheelchair back and heaves himself to his feet, hobbles a step or two, unstiffening. Then he stomps across the living room without a limp.
“Right there, you blind ole sumbitch. Right there. See where I tried to patch it up, bought that stuff from Lowe’s? See what a sorry job I did, trying to patch it together?”
Becky vanishes like the poodle. Dell squints deeper. “Oh. Okay. Yeah.” He nods slowly. “I see it.” He gets to his feet, Kenny right up beside him now, wagging the guitar case back and forth from his waist, and Dell can smell the aftershave heavy on him. Dell reaches up on tiptoe, gritting his teeth against the old pain that lightnings down his right leg, and runs his fingers along the splits. “That is sorry.”
“You never seen such shaking, buddy, the night that ceiling busted open.” And now Kenny is going. “Here we was, just setting eating supper, had a big pitcher of ice tea there in the middle, and they set one off”—he leaps back, throws out his arms, the guitar case slamming into the door frame—“blew that pitcher clear up off the table. And she didn’t tip, boys, she didn’t tip, but tea sloshed out all over ever’thing. Spoilt our spaghetti.” He swings the guitar case at the back wall. “Got them windows, too, that time. But I done replaced those.”
“It’s terrible.” Dell shakes his head, freshly mournful and shocked, as though they’ve not already had this exchange eight times, ten. “It’s just terrible.” Then he cocks his head, studies the cracks more intently. He spreads his thumb and first finger to take the measure of one. “Huh. But I think I seen bigger cracks than these down at Charlie’s.” He nods thoughtfully. “Yeah. Believe I did. And over at Miz Reynolds’, too, come to think of it.”
Kenny starts working his mouth, his teeth rabbitting his bottom lip. The eyes seem to steam, Dell can see the wet glow. Finally Kenny snorts. “You did, huh? You did?” He reels away, the case grazing Dell’s arm, and marches into the hall. “Well, you follow me. You just follow me.”
Dell does. Kenny is heading for the fractures behind the photos in the hall, skipping both the living room and the garage. The tour is going so fast that Dell wonders—like he did last time, that tour shortened, too—how much Kenny is truly led on and how much he’s performing, exactly like Dell and Becky are. “See here? My Sheetrock?” Kenny has unhooked the picture of his son Roger in his high school football uniform and the one of him and Becky getting married, and he thumps the wall with his palm. “Here how I tried to paper it back over?” “Yeah,” Dell is commiserating, “I see what you mean, them ones are deeper than Charlie’s,” and as he says that, he’s cramming down the other, what he dares not think in words but what boils up anyway: that maybe, just maybe, the tour will shorten and shorten, until . . .
Then Kenny speaks again, his voice dropping to a husk: “And I got something else to show you, buddy. Here in the bedroom.” He twitches his shoulder back towards the kitchen, and for the first time all morning, he grins. “Not even she don’t know yet.”
The half hope drops out of Dell like a trapdoor in his gut. His face heats, his fists curl—he did think it, did jinx—but still he follows. He tails Kenny into the room, the air close and slept-in, Dell cringing with the queasiness he always feels in other people’s rooms with beds unmade. Kenny is already in the closet, the guitar case tossed on the mattress, Kenny thrusting aside clothes on their hangers, and he calls, “Lookee there, Dell.”
Dell looks. A dim, cream-colored wall.
“I don’t see nothing, Kenny.” He says it in his normal voice. Not the pumped-up playacting one. Not the one that goes along.
Kenny whips his free arm up and jerks a cord. A bare bulb in the ceiling snaps on. “See there?” Kenny’s voice is both soft and shrill. He is looking past Dell, to make sure, Dell knows, that Becky has not sneaked in. “Them scorch marks on the wall.”
The walls shines bare in the harsh light. Dell does not speak.
“That’s where they got it set. They test-runned her the other night, just to see how it worked. Left them marks there.” Kenny drops his arm, the hangers clashing back into place, and shuts the door, gently. He leans forward from his hips towards Dell’s ear. Dell’s arms pimple. “They got a three-mile-long fuse, Dell. End of it laid right under my bedroom.”
Dell feels himself falling away. Kenny shrinking before him, although neither of them has moved, the distance widening, a rushing noise come in. Kenny seen across a featureless gray field. For twenty years, they strip-mined together—contour jobs, peeling the sides off hills. They’d both worked underground first. And after years in tunnels, what it meant to get up on top, nothing about to fall on you, the machines doing all the heavy work, no more black dust. To be up out of the dark. And they’d been proud of what they did, they made America’s electricity, they kept on the lights. The money they earned raised their kids comfortable, like they deserved, way beyond how him and Kenny’d come up, refurbished Dell’s old company house to modern, built Kenny’s from the foundation up.
But to blow the top off a mountain. It wasn’t like this here. Still, by now, Dell understands the little hole inside him, boring down, down, farther than he knew he went, yearning always to be plugged. And all Dell can do is pull a screen across it.
Then the distance dissolves, and Kenny is regular-sized before him again. Dell hears himself speak.
“How’s your bathroom holding up, buddy?”
Dell closes the door at the end of the hall behind them. He squeezes past Kenny and sags down onto the lip of the tub, twists on the spigots and lets the water run hard, his hand in the gush. Kenny has clapped the commode shut and dropped his guitar case, which skitters into the metal trash can and drives it into Dell’s leg. The temperature right, Dell stops the drain and sits, studying the vinyl tile on the wall. He can feel Kenny behind him almost as certain as a touch, sitting on the toilet unlacing his boots—thinking what, Dell never knows. Only when the tub’s full and Dell cuts off the water does Kenny stand and start to fumble with his clothes. The soft plomp on the floor, the clank of the belt buckle. Like he always does, he comes to the tub edge with his boxers still on.
Dell rises and takes Kenny’s upper arm, a little rough. A helping hand, not a petting hand, not a comforting one. Kenny gets his leg over the rim and Dell eases him down until he sits slumped in the water, his arms around his knees. All the muscle in his back has fled to a pile of sags at his waist. His skin is colored like a speckled cold grease.
That time Dell’d visited Jason a year ago, the time they’d gone out to the construction site, Kenny hadn’t stopped him before he left, but Dell’d had to cut a five-day stay two days short. Becky’d called at eleven at night, swearing she’d spent since noon trying to get Kenny to himself, oh, she was terribly sorry, but where else could she turn? Dell had to sleep first. He was way too old to make an eight-hour drive in the middle of the night after playing with his grandbabies all day. He had set his alarm for four.
When he woke, he feared at first he’d overslept, light as it was outside, until he understood it was the condo complex’s security lights. He’d never driven in northern Virginia before dawn, and as he loaded the Metro under floodlights, there stirred in him an uneasiness mingled with awe. Then he was passing under the streetlights that canopied the suburb’s four-lane main drag; the gas stations, office buildings, stores, sidewalks, and the street itself were completely people-less, him the single car, and all of it, everywhere, lit bright as an emergency room.
Dell’s shoulders were hunched, the wheel was dampening under his hand. Then, suddenly, and to his total surprise—the light turned to sound. The strip malls first—they burst into roar, a crowd in his head—then the box stores, Target and
Home Depot and Sam’s, them louder yet, squalling and hollering bald blares of light. Among them the fast-food places, Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Sonic, each shrieking light, and then the quaint and quietful places—coffee shops, boutiques—Dell heard them, too, hissing their squander of light.
He was speeding now, his eyes cramped to just enough pavement to let him safely drive, his body braced, his heart held. And then he was out and onto the highway, hurtling south and west, towards home, his body easing, his breath coming catch-up in his chest—when he heard, from the near distance in what used to be fields, the wailing flare of subdivisions, each one, he knew, either uninhabited or asleep. Yet each one haloed in a great conflagration of light.
In the corner of the tub sits a tall plastic Go-Mart cup Becky keeps there for the purpose. Dell reaches for it. He sinks it into the bath and lifts it full, water dribbling into his pushed-up sleeve. He looks at Kenny’s back, and for a second, Dell knows the chill of Kenny’s bare skin, and for that second, a tenderness spears him. Dell banks it down. He tips the cup. Water sluices over Kenny’s spine. Dell dips again, lifts, and pours. Again. And again. Sloshed water dabbling his knees, an old hurt wrenching his shoulder. Until Kenny starts to come back to himself.
DOG SONG
HIM. HELLING UP a hillside in a thin snow won’t melt, rock-broke, brush-broke, crust-cracking snow throat felt, the winter a cold one, but a dry one, kind of winter makes them tell about the old ones, and him helling up that hill towards her. To where he sees her tree-tied, black trunk piercing snow hide, and the dog, roped, leashed, chained, he can’t tell which, but something not right about the dog he can tell, but he can’t see, can’t see quite full, and him helling. Him helling. His eyes knocking in his head, breath punching out of him in a hole, hah. Hah. Hah. Hah, and the dog, her haunch-sat ear-cocked waiting for him, and him helling. And him helling. And him helling. But he does not ever reach her.
This is his dream.
HIS DOGS STARTED disappearing around the fifteenth of July, near as he could pinpoint it looking back, because it wasn’t until a week after that and he recognized it as a pattern that he started marking when they went. Parchy vanished first. The ugliest dog he ever owned, coated in this close-napped pink-brown hair, his outsides colored like the insides of his mouth, and at first, Matley just figured he’d run off. Matley always had a few who’d run off because he couldn’t bear to keep them tied, but then Buck followed Parchy a week later. But he’d only had Buck a few months, so he figured maybe he’d headed back to where he’d come from, at times they did that, too. Until Missy went, because Matley knew Missy would never stray. She was one of the six dogs he camper-kept, lovely mutt Missy, beautiful patches of twenty different dogs, no, Missy’d been with him seven years and was not one to travel. So on July 22, when Missy didn’t show up for supper, Matley saw a pattern and started keeping track on his funeral home calendar. Randolph went on August 1. Yeah, Matley’d always lost a few dogs. But this was different.
HE’D HEARD WHAT they said down in town, how he had seventy-five dogs back in there, but they did not know. Dog Man, they called him. Beagle Boy. Muttie. Mr. Hound. A few called him Cat. Stayed in a Winnebago camper beside a househole that had been his family home-place before it was carried off in the ’85 flood, an identical Winnebago behind the lived-in one so he could take from the second one parts and pieces as they broke in the first, him economical, savvy, keen, no, Matley was not dumb. He lived off a check he got for something nobody knew what, the youngest of four boys fathered by an old landowner back in farm times, and the other three left out and sold off their inheritance in nibbles and crumbs, acre, lot, gate, and tree, leaving only Matley anchored in there with the dogs and the househole along the tracks. Where a tourist train passed four times a day on summer weekends and even more days a week during leaf colors in fall, the cars bellied full of outsiders come to see the mountain sights—“farm children playing in the fields,” the brochure said, “a land that time forgot”—and there sits Matley on a lawn chair between Winnebagos and househole. He knew what they said in town, the only person they talked about near as often as Matley was ole Johnby, and Johnby they discussed only half as much. They said Mr. Hound had seventy-five dogs back in there, nobody had ever seen anything like it, half of them living outside in barrels, the other half right there in the camper with him. It was surely a health hazard, but what could you do about it? That’s what they said.
But Matley never had seventy-five dogs. Before they started disappearing, he had twenty-two, and only six he kept in the camper, and one of those six was Guinea, who fit in his sweatshirt pocket, so didn’t hardly count. And he looked after them well, wasn’t like that one woman kept six Pomeranians in a Jayco pop-up while she stayed in her house and they all got burned up in a camper fire. Space heater. The outside dogs he built shelters for, terraced the houses up the side of the hill, and, yes, some of them were barrels on their sides braced with two-by-four struts, but others he fashioned out of scrap lumber, plenty of that on the place, and depending on what mood took him, sometimes he’d build them square and sometimes he’d build them like those lean-to teepees where people keep fighting cocks. Some dogs, like Parchy, slept in cut-out cable spools, a cable spool was the only structure in which Parchy would sleep, Matley could find cable spools and other almost doghouses along the river after the spring floods. And he never had seventy-five dogs.
Parchy, Buck, Missy, Randolph, Ghostdog, Blackie, Ed. Those went first. That left Tick, Hickory, Cese, Muddy Gut, Carmel, Big Girl, Leesburg, Honey, Smartie, Ray Junior, Junior Junior, Louise, Fella, Meredith, and Guinea. Junior Junior was only a pup at the time, Smartie was just a part-time dog, stayed two or three nights a week across the river with his Rottweiler girlfriend, and Meredith was pregnant. Guinea goes at the end of the list because Guinea was barely dog at all.
THEY COULD TELL you in town that Matley was born old, born with the past squeezing on him, and he was supposed to grow up in that? How? There was no place to go but backwards. His parents were old by the time he came, his brothers gone by the time he could remember, his father dead by the time he was eight. Then the flood, on his twenty-third birthday. In town they might spot Matley in his ’86 Chevette loaded from floorboards to dome light with twenty-five pound bags of Joy Dog food, and one ole boy would say, “Well, there he goes. That ruint runt of Revie’s four boys. End piece didn’t come right.”
Another: “I heard he was kinda retarded.”
“No, not retarded exactly . . . but he wasn’t born until Revie was close to fifty. And that explains a few things. Far as I’m concerned. Old egg, old sperm, old baby.”
“Hell, weren’t none of them right,” observes a third.
“There’s something about those hills back in there. You know Johnby’s from up there, too.”
“Well,” says the last. “People are different.”
Matley. His ageless, colorless, changeless self. Dressed always in baggy river-colored pants and a selection of pocketed sweatshirts he collected at yard sales. His bill-busted, sweat-mapped, river-colored cap, and the face between sweatshirt and cap as common and unmemorable as the pattern on a sofa. Matley had to have such a face, given what went on under and behind it. The bland face, the constant clothes, they had to balance out what rode behind them, or Matley might be so loose as to fall. Because Matley had inherited from his parents not just the oldness, and not just the past (that gaping loss), and not just the irrational stick to the land, even land that you hated, and not just scraps of the land itself, and the collapsed buildings, and the househole, but also the loose part, he knew. Worst of all, he’d inherited the loose part inside (you got to hold on tight).
NOW IT WAS a couple years before the dogs started disappearing that things had gotten interesting from the point of view of them in town. They told. Matley’s brother Charles sold off yet another plat on the ridge above the househole, there on what had always been called High Boy until the developers got to it, renamed i
t Oaken Acre Estates, and the out-of-staters who moved in there started complaining about the barking and the odor, and then the story got even better. One of Dog Man’s Beagle Boy’s Cat’s mixed-breed who-knows-what’s got up in there and impregnated some purebred something-or-other one of the imports owned, “and I heard they had ever last one of them pups put to sleep. That’s the kind of people they are, now,” taking Matley’s side for once. Insider versus outsider, even Muttie didn’t look too bad that way.
Matley knew. At first those pureblood-dog old people on High Boy appeared only on an occasional weekend, but then they returned to live there all the time, which was when the trouble started. They sent down a delegation of two women one summer, and when that didn’t work, they sent two men. Matley could tell they were away from here from a distance, could tell from how they carried themselves before they even got close and confirmed it with their clothes. “This county has no leash ordinance,” he told that second bunch because by that time he had checked, learned the lingo, but they went on to tell him how they’d paid money to mate this pureblood dog of some type Matley’d never heard of to another of its kind, but a mongrel got to her before the stud, and they were blaming it on one of his. Said it wasn’t the first time, either. “How many unneutered dogs do you have down here?” they asked, and, well, Matley never could stand to have them cut. So. But it wasn’t until a whole year after the encounter that his dogs started disappearing, and Matley, of course, had been raised to respect the old.
The calendar was a free one from Berger’s Funeral Home, kind of calendar has just one picture to cover all the months, usually a picture of a blonde child in a nightgown praying beside a bed, and this calendar had that picture, too. Blonde curls praying over lost dog marks, Matley almost made them crosses, but he changed them to question marks, and he kept every calendar page he tore off. He kept track, and for each one, he carried a half eulogy, half epitaph in his head:
