Letting Loose the Hounds

by Brady Udall

  More praise for

  Letting Loose the Hounds

  “There is a wonderful innocence in Udall’s narrative voice, a risk and edge to these stories that make for delightful reading…. Letting Loose the Hounds has a great deal of meat to it, nothing sliced thin and served on a bed of watercress…. Always under the surface, there is a raised eyebrow, a bit of laughter, and the wildness of a writer who understands his backyard and plays by his own rules.”

  —Jeff Metcalf, Bloomsbury Review

  “What makes Udall such a talented writer is his ability to make his reader like these characters without a hint of condescension or pity…. Reminiscent of the fiction of Russell Banks, Udall’s characters are men who struggle to come to terms with what it means to be masculine in a society in which the rules always seem to be beyond their grasp.”

  —Michael A. Elliott, Boston Book Review

  “A gritty debut…. Udall articulates the sorrow and humor of his characters’ situations so well that their bellowing displays of bravado provide a catharsis.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Bittersweet…memorable…. Udall breathes fresh life into tales of the modern West. The writing is full of colorful language, slang, and the rhythm of everyday speech…. Udall has a bright future in fiction.”

  —Library Journal

  “Brady Udall works with a whole lot of grace and an exquisite eye for detail. His characters find redemption in the utterly surprising places we suspected it lurked all along.”

  —Pam Houston

  “Brady Udall must have a wild and lonely heart. Nothing scares him, not emptiness or fallen hopes or silence, not the unsparing and fractured geography out there in the new American West.”

  —John Dufresne

  “One of the top writers of his generation…. Brady Udall’s stories, full of comedy and pain and trouble, carry a mighty kick.”

  —Thom Jones

  “Anybody who is very funny and writes, with love and a full heart, about goats, Whoppers, plastic deer, Mormons basketball, and nervous system disorders has got what it takes. Brady Udall has got what it takes, and thank goodness it doesn’t break his heart to give it away.”

  —Clyde Edgerton

  “Intimate and funny, and distinctly Western in flavor, Brady Udall’s prose is as natural and pure as the landscape he describes. The voices are filled with a sense of the ordinary turning into a kind of knee-slapping wonder. An irresistible performance.”

  —Judith Freeman

  “Individually Brady Udall’s stories are exciting, hilarious, gripping, and usually a bit sad. Collectively, they make a work of great power, one that illuminates the usually darkened corners of the male character.”

  —Pinckney Benedict

  Letting Loose the Hounds

  Also by Brady Udall

  The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

  The Lonely Polygamist

  Letting Loose the Hounds

  Stories

  Brady Udall

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York / London

  Copyright © 1997 by Brady Udall

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Udall, Brady.

  Letting loose the hounds : stories / Brady Udall.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-33984-0

  I. Title.

  PS3571.D36L48 1997

  813’.54–dc20 96-18642

  CIP

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For Kate

  Contents

  Midnight Raid

  Buckeye the Elder

  Ballad of the Ball and Chain

  Junk Court

  Letting Loose the Hounds

  The Opposite of Loneliness

  The Wig

  Vernon

  Snake

  Beautiful Places

  He Becomes Deeply and Famously Drunk

  Some of these stories originally appeared in the following publications, for which grateful acknowledgment is given:

  Aethlon: “Junk Court”

  Gentleman’s Quarterly: “Midnight Raid”

  The Midwesterner: “Vernon”

  The Paris Review: “Letting Loose the Hounds”

  Playboy: “Buckeye the Elder”

  Story Magazine: “The Opposite of Loneliness,” “Snake,” “The Wig”

  Sunstone: “Beautiful Places”

  Thanks to the James Michener/Copernicus Society and the Henfield Foundation for their generous financial assistance, and to all the editors, teachers, friends, too numerous to name, who helped make these stories better. And deepest thanks to three people in particular: Nicole Aragi for doing the dirty work; Carol Houck Smith for humor and grace; Darrell Spencer for showing me how.

  Letting Loose the Hounds

  Midnight Raid

  Roy growls and gives me the evil eye from inside his doghouse. He’s flustered; I’m fairly certain this is the first time in his life a six-foot-three Apache Indian holding a goat has walked into his backyard in the middle of the night. Roy, there under the comfort of his own roof, seems to be trying to come to a decision. He doesn’t know whether to raise hell or to make friends with me. I slowly take a step closer—no sudden moves—and ask him, as sincerely as possible, not to make any undue racket. He pokes his head out of his house and yaps, causing the goat I’m holding to let loose a thin stream of piss down my leg.

  I suppose this ought to be explained: Roy is the pet of my ex-wife Amy and her new husband Howard, whose backyard I am currently lurking around in. The goat is a present for my seven-year-old son, Tate. Tate is somewhere in this immense, tacky house and my plan is to get this goat to him without Amy or Howard finding out about it. This is Scottsdale, Arizona, close to midnight and not too many degrees shy of a hundred. I would be untruthful if I didn’t say I was a little drunk. I have dead grass in my hair and my belly feels like it’s full of sharp sticks. Small, silvery fish are swimming around in my head, flashing behind my eyes like coins.

  I’m positive that what I’m doing is the correct, the honorable thing. In that earnest, heartbreaking penmanship of his, my boy has written me at least half a dozen times asking for his pet goat, and no matter what my wife has to throw at me, the injunctions and restraining orders and so forth, I am going to get it to him.

  “Roy,” I say, looking up at this pink stuccoed mansion that’s big enough for two zip codes, “where’s Tate?”

  Roy has no idea. And he’s wondering how I know his name. Fact is, it’s written in big capital letters above his little door, exactly the way they do it in cartoons. Roy tiptoes out of his house, his head cocked to one side, to have a better look at me. He’s perplexed and not afraid to admit it. I hold out my hand, the universal peace offering, and he gives me a doubtful sniff. From the looks of him, Roy is not a pure breed of any kind. He has a thick, wedge-shaped head and bulging Marty Feldman eyes. His butt is as pink and hairless as a baboon’s. He circles me once, paying particular attention to the goat. I think he’s beginning to understand that neither of us are here to cause any harm.

  Two lights are still on upstairs; I’m going to have to wait here until everything is dark and quiet before I make my move. Meantime, I’ll sober up, gather my wits, get to know Roy a little. The backyard I’m in is nothing more than a football-field-sized patch of dry gr
ass with a doghouse in the middle of it. There’s no swing set or old soccer ball or anything else you’d expect to find in the yard in which a seven-year-old plays. Poor old Roy here doesn’t even have a rubber bone to chew on. This is more a wasteland than a backyard, as if the soul of the desert still festers in this very spot, refusing to be driven out with sprinklers and lawnmowers and fertilizer. I sit down on the baked, crunching grass and look up at the drifting clouds that have been turned murky shades of orange and green by the lights of the city.

  It would have been much more simple and comfortable to wait in front of the house in my air-conditioned truck, but this beefy woman security guard kept walking by, asking what my business in the neighborhood was. I made up elaborate lies about a surprise party for my mother-in-law who lived just down the street. Pretty soon she started asking for names and addresses. She wanted to see some identification. I mumbled and coughed and acted drunker than I was and she told me I’d have to leave or she’d call the cops. So I parked my truck at a mini-mall about a mile away and came in on foot, sticking to the shadows and bushes, the goat heehawing and complaining the whole time. I had to be particularly careful because nearly all the houses around here have huge floodlights, as powerful as the kind you might find at Yankee Stadium, that are specifically designed to keep people like me away.

  Theoretically, the art of sneaking and hiding and stealing through the night should be in my blood. I’m three-quarters Apache, a registered member of the White Mountain tribe. They say my ancestors could melt into the underbrush, run at full speed without making a sound, crouch as still as a tree stump for hours on end. Soldiers of the U.S. Army used to swear that the Apache had the power to make themselves invisible. Right now, I would settle for just being able to keep this goat quiet.

  I never lived the Apache lifestyle, even by today’s standard; I grew up in a middle-class section of Winslow where my father worked at the post office. Most of my extended family lives on the reservation and when I go to visit they all laugh at me. They tell me I talk like John Wayne. The say I smell like a department store. And I married a white woman which did not go over too well. What has being an Indian meant to me? A scholarship from UCLA, a boring job at an electronics firm and suspicious looks from the clerk whenever I go into a 7-11.

  Most everybody thinks that the breakup happened because of the pressures and conflicts that go along with an interracial marriage. Actually, this had nothing to do with it at all. Our divorce was an honest, smash-mouth affair based on past indiscretions and betrayals on both our parts. Until the very end we went on pretending that everything was perfect, never looking one another in the eye. Then one day my wife came home and accused me of “malfeasance.” Right then I knew it was all over. You don’t come into your own home throwing around words like “malfeasance” unless you’ve been talking to lawyers. Amy got the boy, our classic Cadillac and most of the money, leaving me with the house and the pickup. Now she’s married to a retired rancher who has the money to waste on lawyers who have the arcane ability to twist the law, make it so that a father cannot even see his own son. “Damn the law,” I say to Roy. “Damn the Constitution.” Roy licks his chops and doesn’t disagree.

  In the backyard that adjoins this one somebody has begun making a racket, splashing around in their pool and burping and singing snatches of old Sinatra songs in a way that is painful to hear. After awhile I can’t stand it anymore and I walk over to the fence—it’s quite a long walk—with Roy following behind. The fence is much too high to see over so I just have to yell, “Will you put a lid on it over there?”

  “Who said that?” the guy calls out. By his voice I’d guess he’s around retirement age and has a good bit of beer in him.

  “Over here,” I say.

  “Are you my neighbor?”

  “I could be.”

  “What’s the yelling for?”

  “It’s to quiet you down.”

  “I think you’re just jealous of this nice pool I’ve got. You’re the only goddamn one in this whole goddamn neighborhood without a pool. It’s common knowledge around here.”

  I don’t have anything to say to that so I keep my mouth shut.

  “Well, why?” he says.

  “Why what?”

  “Why don’t you have a pool?”

  I think about it for a minute. “Because I’m a horse’s ass.”

  “Ten-four,” he says.

  I go back to my spot next to Roy’s doghouse and sit down on this lawn that’s as soft and inviting as the bottom of a skillet. It really makes me wonder what kind of sense Amy and this Howard character have. What’s the point in living in a place like this, knocking elbows with the rich and the famous, and not owning a pool? I could be taking a few laps and cooling off while I wait instead of sitting here, covered with a grainy film of sweat and smelling like a world war. I think if I was the goat I’d be complaining too.

  Tate loves this damn goat more than anything in the world and for reasons I can’t understand, Amy won’t let him have it. I’ve fought with her about it, called her up on the phone and told her that for a child to grow up without a pet is not right. She told me Tate had a pet, a dog that he got along with rather well. Tate wrote me a letter to set the record straight. He said he didn’t like the dog much at all; it was ugly and stupid and had bugs living in its fur. Though Roy does have his positive qualities, I would have to say Tate had him pegged pretty good. All I want, Tate wrote, is Jumpy, my goat. That tore my heart in two meaty halves, brought water to my eyes, and here I am, doing what I can to make my boy happy.

  As long as the truth is coming out all over the place, I might as well admit that the goat I’m holding in my arms, the one Roy is sniffing warily right now, is not the original Jumpy. Tate found the original Jumpy tangled in some barbed wire near our home in Flagstaff. We were never able to find the owner so Tate kept it. It was a cute little thing, so tiny, with its flopping ears and old man’s beard. Tate loved it so much he kept it in his room for the first few days, put Pampers on it and fed it with a bottle. After the stink got to be too bad I built a small pen for it out back. A few months passed and we noticed that it wasn’t growing at all. We took it to the vet and he told us it was not a baby goat as we’d thought all along, but an adult pygmy goat. He held up one of its hind legs and said, “See there? Fully developed gonads.”

  “Adult?” we said. “Gonads?”

  The vet said, “Adult as it gets. It’s a pygmy goat. It’s small. That’s the point.”

  We didn’t have the heart or the know-how to explain to Tate that this cute little pet of his was not an innocent baby, but an adult with an active sex drive, fully developed gonads and the whole bit. We let him live with that childhood notion that it’s possible for things to stay the same, that everything in this world does not have to become old and tired and undone.

  When Amy left with Tate, she wouldn’t let him take Jumpy. Maybe, like me, she saw the goat as a symbol or a reminder of something: our shared life, our togetherness. They went away and I never fed the goat again. I don’t know how long it was before it died; I stopped going to work, I was drunk and fairly deranged twenty-four hours a day. I came unglued; there were pieces of me all over my suddenly too-large house. I wandered room to room, shuffling my feet and knocking things over like a clumsy ghost. One day I looked out the window. Down in Jumpy’s pen were several buzzards and some crows all crammed in a huddle as if discussing secret matters. I grabbed my shotgun, intent on blowing those carrion-eaters into next Sunday, but in my condition I couldn’t even find the safety on the gun and those evil birds got away scot-free. Jumpy was just a little pile of bones that looked like the remains of somebody’s chicken dinner. He had eaten every last weed and blade of grass inside his pen and the bark on the lower sections of the cedar fence posts had been completely chewed away. Right then I would have turned the gun on myself had I been able to locate the goddamn safety.

  I let almost a year go by before the guilt, eating at
my insides like an ulcer, drove me to do something about it. It took two weeks, around four dozen phone calls and a three-hundred-mile trip to Albuquerque to find a pygmy goat that looked anything similar to Jumpy. The guy that sold it to me was an old Mexican bean farmer with unnecessarily perfect teeth. I guess he could see the desperation running rampant on my face and he couldn’t stop smiling about it. He told me he wouldn’t part with this goat for less than one hundred and thirty-three dollars. He said he had special feelings for this particular animal and to give it up to a stranger like me would cause considerable pain no matter what the price. I coughed up ninety dollars—it was all I had to spare—and on my way down here I stopped at a Burger King and bought the goat a Whopper, some fries and a shake.

  We’ve been together two days now and this goat is beginning to get to me. Sometimes, for no reason at all, it raises its tiny head and lets out a high-pitched squall that sounds like the screech of car tires. It has already bitten all the buttons off my shirt and swallowed them, not to mention the pissing and shitting every half hour. Roy, who apparently has come to the conclusion that neither of us provide any great threat, sits right next to me, his butt jammed against mine, and looks up at me with these glossy, rolling eyes. I give him a squeeze. We all need love and Roy is no different. He sighs in my face and I inform him his breath could be better.

  Both of the lights upstairs go off within seconds of each other. I get up and wander around the back of the house, checking the windows and the sliding glass door. All locked. A dry, cottony panic expands in my throat, shutting off my air. I had this crazy idea in my head that I could just crawl through a window, locate Tate in the slumbering household, leave the goat with him and be on my way. This was the plan I came up with after a few rounds of tequila at the bar earlier this evening. Now that I’m bordering on sober, I’m aware that that it’s not going to work. No doubt Howard has an alarm system rigged up to protect his house; Amy wouldn’t just marry any idiot. And if there’s one thing I don’t want, it’s to get the police involved.