Letting Loose the Hounds

by Brady Udall

  I lie down on the grass and squeeze my head between my hands, trying to think. Lord, this heat! Hell could not do much better than this. It feels as if all the moisture has been sucked out of my brain, leaving it as useless as a punctured football. My teeth and eyeballs are like old wood. Roy comes over and goes to work licking my face. I take an after-dinner mint from my jeans pocket and give it to him. He gnashes it into a fine green paste, smiles at me and waits for another. I pull my pockets inside out to illustrate there is no more where that came from.

  My watch tells me it’s already one a.m. I have to do something—I can’t spend all night commiserating with a dog in this pounding heat. I stand up and look around for something to throw; there’s nothing in the grass, not so much as a stick or a pebble. I peel one of the tar shingles off Roy’s doghouse and sling it like a Frisbee at what I hope will be Tate’s window. The shingle misses by a good five feet and thwaps against the side of the house, causing a shower of stucco dust to float to the grass like pink snow. For some reason this sends Roy into a barking frenzy and before I can get him quieted down a light comes on upstairs. I crouch behind the doghouse, my chin between my knees. I hear a window slide open and Amy say, “Roy, will you shut up?” in that beautiful voice of hers that sounds like rain falling on a lake. Back when we were going out I used to call her answering machine when she wasn’t home just to listen to the puff and slide of her vowels.

  I can’t help myself. Staying where I am I say, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”

  There is a long, thunderous silence before she says, “Jerry?”

  I stand up. No more sneaking around like a coward. I pick up the goat and say, “I’m here to—I brought this—I’m absolutely serious, dammit.”

  She is a black cut-out against the light behind her. I can tell she is straining to see; she takes her contacts out before she goes to bed. She whispers, “Oh, Lord.”

  She moves away from the window and seconds later a light blinks on in the living room. I tuck my shirt in and try to shake the debris out of my hair. She opens the door and sticks her head out. She’s wearing black-rimmed glasses and an expression of bewilderment. Roy barks happily and the goat gives me a solid kick in the ribs, a blow akin to being jabbed in the midsection with the fat end of a pool cue. Howard appears at the top of the stairs and begins an uneven, thumping descent. From this distance, he looks younger than his sixty-one years. His skin is the polished bronze Hollywood actors would sell their souls for.

  Holding my gut, I push the door open and step inside. A frosty air-conditioned current swirls over me and it’s as if I’ve just stumbled into heaven. I shut the door behind me so as to not let any of this wonderful air out. Roy puts his nose on the glass and looks up at me as if I’ve betrayed him.

  “For God’s sake, Jerry,” Amy says. Why would she have to be wearing the green satin nightgown I bought for her birthday a few years ago? This is the nightgown that shows up in a good many of my fondest memories. I can smell the aloe lotion she likes to use on her skin.

  “I brought this goat, for Tate,” I say. My voice is a wounded, struggling thing in the cool elegance of this living room. “Just two minutes to give him the goat and say hello and I’m gone. You won’t even notice me.”

  Howard limps up next to Amy and I see under the hem of his bathrobe that he has one normal, tanned leg and one that is made of shiny, flesh-colored plastic. His white hair is like the bristles on a toilet brush. Can it be that my wife left me to marry this liver-spotted senior citizen with dentures and an artificial leg? Then I remember how rich the son of a bitch is and it makes me feel a little better.

  “Would someone kindly inform me as to what in the name of hell is going on here?” he says. If it is possible to make a western drawl sound refined and high-minded, then this guy is pulling it off. We are standing on a circular rug that is made from the hides of at least six cows. Expensive Navajo rugs hang from almost every wall.

  “Is Tate’s room upstairs?” I ask.

  “Now wait right there, son,” Howard says, standing between me and the foot of the staircase. “You’re breaking the law here. You’ve just entered my house without permission and broken the terms of the restraining order placed on you last month. You’re up shit creek and sinking fast.”

  Did he call me “son”? I look at Amy to see if she is as astounded by this as I am. Her arms are folded over her chest and she’s chewing on her thumbnail—tick tick tick—a habit that used to drive me crazy until I bought her a self-help book that aided her in finding the inner power to stop.

  I start for the stairs and Howard blocks my way, resting his hand lightly on my shoulder. He gives me this terrifically sincere look and says, “You and the farm animal are invited to leave.”

  I shift the goat to my left arm and hit him in the mouth with my right. He teeters for a moment on his good leg, his lower lip already sprouting blood, before he goes down. I know that he is handicapped and older than my own father, but who ever accused an Apache of fighting fair? Maybe when everything is finished Howard will count himself lucky that he made it through this whole situation without getting scalped.

  What I feel climbing the stairs is not the mindless, teeth-grinding anger that usually rises up when I’m in a situation that involves confrontation and punches and blood. At first the only thing inside me is the blinders-on determination that I’m not leaving this house without seeing my son, but something else comes over me, a sudden ache of sadness at the measures we have to take, the desperations and last resorts. I feel an unwieldy heaviness, all thirty-eight years of me pressing down, and as I haul myself up those last few steps it’s all I can do to keep from dropping the goat down the stairs.

  I open all the doors in the upstairs hallway and the last one is Tate’s; I can tell it instantly by the smell of dirty socks and model airplane glue. I put the goat down and kneel by his bed in the strip of light coming in from the hall. Can there be anything more sweet and beautiful than a sleeping child, especially your own? He snorts and rubs his face in his Robocop pillow, oblivious to the adult idiocy going on around him. Amy stands in the doorway for a second, most likely to make sure that I’m not doing anything drastic, and I have this terrible sense of déja vu: after dinner and TV, Tate wrapped up in his covers, me telling boring stories about my college years in the hopes it will put him to sleep, Amy looking in on the both of us.

  When I glance up again Amy is gone. I can hear her downstairs exchanging whispers with Howard. Looking down at my sleeping son, feeling his heart vibrating through the blanket, I’m nearly paralyzed with the thought that in a matter of minutes I’ll be forced to walk away, leave him here in this strange room, in this strange house. It takes what little strength I have left to move away from the bed, turn on a lamp, retrieve the goat from over by the desk where it’s chewing on one of Tate’s baseball cards. I empty out his toy box and put the goat inside so it won’t be able to run loose. I sit down at his miniature desk and write him a short note with the only writing instrument available, a fat neon-green marker shaped like a dancing dragon. In a shaky, trailing hand I remind him to make sure to feed the goat every day and to mind his mother. I tell him that I love him and to remember me in his prayers. Before leaving, I tidy up his room a little.

  Downstairs, Howard is on the phone, blood smeared on his chin and a shiny old-style silver and gold pistol dangling from one hand, explaining calmly and eloquently to the police that an intruder, a crazed Indian no less, has violated the sacred boundaries of his home. He informs them that if someone does not arrive on the double, he may be obliged to use the kind of deadly force you read about in the newspapers.

  I stand at the bottom of the stairs unsure of what to do next. Amy is nowhere to be seen. I know I should get out of here fast if I don’t want to be making conversation with druggies and car thieves in the county jail tonight, but first I feel something has to be said, some apology made.

  Howard puts down the phone and says, making sure I
can see the gun in his hand, “Are you on your way out?”

  Unable to come up with anything better, I say, “This is a real nice house you’ve got here, Howard.”

  Amy appears out of the kitchen with a glass of scotch in her hand. She stares at me blankly, as if I’m a salesman who has entered her house to demonstrate a product she has no interest in.

  “You might think about getting a pool, though,” I say. “A pool would be nice.”

  “I can’t swim,” Howard says.

  “It’s late,” Amy sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.

  “Migraine?” I say.

  She says, “Please, Jerry.”

  “Okay, yep, no problem.” I’m talking on my way to the front door just to fill the silence. “I better be leaving. Bye-bye.”

  Once Howard has shut the door on me and I’m outside, empty-handed and loping across the scorching street, I feel more lonely and lost than I ever have in my life; it’s as if I’ve been completely scraped out from the inside. I make it to the end of the block before I do a one-eighty and sprint back to Amy and Howard’s backyard. I open the gate and Roy is waiting right there as if he knew I would return. “You want to come?” I whisper and he goes haywire, huffing and yapping, his tail whipping all over the place. He ricochets off my chest and runs around in a tight circle. I take out my pocketknife and scratch a few words above the name on his doghouse so it reads like a short farewell letter:

  I’m long gone

  Love,

  ROY

  I grab hold of his collar and lead him out into the street. I don’t have a leash, but he stays right with me, his shoulder sporadically bumping my leg. We’re trotting across someone’s front lawn when I have to pull him into the bushes to let a patrol car go by, lights pulsing. I get my wind back and we’re off again, ducking and sprinting from house to house, dodging through sprinklers and hiding behind an occasional decorative cactus, keeping to the shrubbery and shadows when we can.

  Buckeye the Elder

  Things I learned about Buckeye a few minutes before he broke my collarbone: he is twenty-five years old, in love with my older sister, a native of Wisconsin and therefore a Badger. “Not really a Buckeye at all,” he explained, sitting in my father’s recliner and paging through a book about UFOs and other unsolved mysteries. “But I keep the name for respect of the man who gave it to me, my father and the most loyal alumnus Ohio State ever produced.”

  Buckeye had stopped by earlier this afternoon to visit my sister, Simone, whom he had been seeing over the past week or so. Though Simone had yammered all about him over the dinner table, it was the first time I’d actually met him. When he arrived, Simone wasn’t back from her class at the beauty college and I was the only one in the house. Buckeye came inside for a few minutes and talked to me like I was someone he’d known since childhood. He showed me old black-and-white photos of his parents, a gold tooth he found on the floor of a bar in Detroit, a ticket stub autographed by Marty Robbins. Among other things, we talked about his passion for rugby and he invited me out to the front yard for a few lessons on rules and technique. Everything went fine until tackling came up. He positioned himself in front of me and instructed me to try to get around him and he would demonstrate the proper way to wrap up the ball player and drag him down. I did what I was told and ended up with two hundred-plus pounds worth of Buckeye driving my shoulder into the hard dirt. We both heard the snap, clear as you please.

  “Was that you?” Buckeye said, already picking me up and setting me on my feet. My left shoulder sagged and I couldn’t move my arm but there wasn’t an alarming amount of pain. Buckeye helped me to the porch and brought out the phone so I could call my mother, who is on her way over right now to pick me up and take me to the hospital.

  I’m sitting in one of the porch rocking chairs and Buckeye is standing next to me, nervously shifting his feet. He is the picture of guilt and worry; he puts his face in his hands, paces up and down the steps, comes back over to inspect my shoulder for the dozenth time. There is a considerable lump where the fractured bone is pushing up against the skin.

  A grim-faced Buckeye says, “Snapped in two, not a doubt in this world.”

  He puts his face right into mine as if he’s trying to see something behind my eyes. “You aren’t in shock are you?” he says. “You don’t want an ambulance?”

  “I’m okay,” I say. Other than being a little light-headed, I feel pretty good. There is something gratifying about having a serious injury and no serious pain to go with it. More than anything, I’m worried about Buckeye, who is acting like he’s just committed murder. He’s asked me twice now if I wouldn’t just let him swing me over his shoulders and run me over to the hospital himself.

  “Where is my self-control?” he questions the rain gutter. “Why can’t I get a hold of my situations?” He turns to me and says, “There’s no excuses, none, but I’m used to tackling guys three times your size, God forgive me. I didn’t think you’d go down that easy.”

  Buckeye has a point. I am almost as tall as he is but am at least sixty pounds lighter. All I really feel right now is embarrassment for going down so easy. I tell him that it was nobody’s fault, that my parents are generally reasonable people, and that my sister will probably like him all that much more.

  Buckeye doesn’t look at all comforted. He keeps up his pacing. He thinks aloud with his chin in his chest, mumbling into the collar of his shirt as if there is someone down there listening. He rubs his head with his big knobby hands and gives himself a good tongue-lashing. There is an ungainly energy to the way he moves. He is thick in some places, thin in others and has joints like those on a backhoe. He’s barrel-chested, has elongated piano player’s fingers and is missing a good portion of his left ear which was ground off by the cleat of a stampeding Polynesian at the Midwest Rugby Invitationals. I can’t explain this, but I’m feeling quite pleased that Buckeye has broken my shoulder.

  When my mother pulls up in her new Lincoln, Buckeye picks up me and the chair I’m in. With long, smooth strides he delivers me to the car, all the time saying some sort of prayer, asking the Lord to bless me, heal me, and help me forgive. One of the more important things that Buckeye didn’t tell me about himself that first day was that he is a newly baptized Mormon. I’ve found out this is the only reason my parents ever let him within rock-throwing distance of my sister. As far as my parents are concerned, solid Baptists that they are, either you’re with Jesus or you’re against him. I guess they figured that Buckeye, as close as he might be to the dividing line, is on the right side.

  In the week that has passed since the accident, Buckeye has turned our house into a carnival. The night we came home from the hospital, me straight-backed and awkward in my brace and Buckeye still asking forgiveness every once in awhile, we had a celebration—in honor of who or what I still can’t be sure. We ordered pizza and my folks, who almost never drink, made banana daiquiris while Simone held hands with Buckeye and sipped ginger ale. Later, my daiquiri-inspired father, once a 163-pound district champion in high school, coaxed Buckeye into a wrestling match in the front room. While my sister squealed and my mother screeched about hospital bills and further injury, Buckeye wore a big easy grin and let my father pin him solidly on our mint-green carpet.

  I suppose there were two things going on: we were officially sanctioning Buckeye’s relationship with Simone and at the same time commemorating my fractured clavicle, the first manly injury I’ve ever suffered. Despite and possibly because of the aspirations of my sports-mad father, I am the type of son who gets straight A’s and likes to sit in his room and make models of spaceships. My father dreamed I would play for the Celtics one day. Right now, having just finished my sophomore year in high school, my only aspiration is to write a best-selling fantasy novel.

  My sister goes to beauty school, which is a huge disappointment to my pediatrician mother. Simone can’t bear to tell people that my father distills sewer water for a living.
Even though I love them, I sincerely believe my parents to be narrow-minded religious fanatics and as for Simone, I think beauty school might be an intellectual stretch. As far as I can tell, our family is nothing more than a bunch of people living in the same house who are disappointed in each other.

  But we all love Buckeye. He’s the only thing we agree on. The fact that Simone and my parents would go for someone like him is surprising when you consider the coarse look he has about him, the kind of look you see on people in bus stations and in the backs of fruit trucks. Maybe it’s his fine set of teeth that salvages him from looking like an out-and-out redneck.

  Tonight Buckeye is taking me on a drive. Since we first met, Buckeye has spent more time with me than he has with Simone. My parents think this is a good idea; I don’t have many friends and they think he will have a positive effect on their agnostic, asocial son. We are in his rust-cratered vehicle that might have been an Oldsmobile at one time. Buckeye has just finished a day’s work as a pantyhose salesman and smells like the perfume of the women he talks to on porches and doorsteps. He sells revolutionary no-run stockings that carry a lifetime guarantee. He’s got stacks of them in the back seat. At eighteen dollars a pair, he assures these women, they are certainly a bargain. He is happy and loose and driving all over the road. He has just brought me up to date on his teenage years, his father’s death, the thirteen states he’s lived in and the twenty-two jobs he’s held since then.

  “Got it all up here,” he says, tapping his forehead. “Don’t let a day slide by without detailed documentation.” Over the past few days I’ve noticed Buckeye has a way of speaking that makes people pause. One minute he sounds like a West Texas oil grunt, the next like a semi-educated Midwesterner. Buckeye is a constant surprise.