Letting Loose the Hounds

by Brady Udall

  He held the bat out in front of him until Kitty accepted it. “Will you do something for me?” he asked her.

  Unsure, Kitty nodded.

  Juan tapped his left temple and said, “Just give me a solid one right here.” He stepped forward a little, stretching his neck out so his head was within range.

  Kitty made a little half-laugh, half-gasp and looked over at me for help.

  “Batter up,” Juan said.

  “Juan,” I said.

  Juan looked at her with the sorrowful calm of a lame horse waiting to be shot. Kitty seemed to be hyperventilating and I couldn’t tell if she was terrified or angry or both.

  “It would help a lot,” Juan whispered.

  Kitty began crying but she would not put down the bat. Not taking her eyes off Juan’s shining forehead, she began to cock the bat behind her ear. I went over and took it away from her. “Oh Lord,” she sobbed, covering her mouth, gathering her purse, moving toward the door.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s nothing,” Kitty said, her cheeks slick with tears, her hands fluttering around her like broken-backed birds.

  “You’d be surprised at the amount of trauma the human skull can withstand,” Juan said as Kitty fumbled with the doorknob to leave.

  He stood in the doorway and watched as she went running out to her car, sobbing loudly the whole time, and roared away, tires screeching, down the quiet street, out into the flat darkness. After her tail-lights disappeared his whole body slumped and he groaned, almost inaudibly, and raked at his face with his fingers.

  After a while he turned around and looked at me for a second, his eyes vacant and moist. He went to sit on the couch, changed his mind, stood at the window and stared out. He began nodding his head, like someone trying to muster conviction.

  “Rita?” he called out, like I was far away, not just five feet from him. He knelt down in front of me and took the hat off his head, put it over his heart. I realized I was still holding the bat.

  “Rita,” he said, “marry me?”

  For a moment I was simply dumbstruck, and then a terrific rush of joy and relief began building up inside me, a feeling I gave into completely until I looked into Juan’s eyes. What I saw there was not love or the need to be loved or anything like it—it was the same look he had waiting for Kitty to club him on the head, the same look he’d worn most of the last six months. The hope of a long happy life together was the furthest thing from his mind. I knew exactly what he was thinking, kneeling there in front of me. He was thinking of being dragged down by an impossible weight, clawing for air, lungs filling with black water until they burst.

  I dropped the bat and walked out of the room, left Juan kneeling by the window. There was nothing else to do; I felt like I’d fallen down a flight of stairs.

  All that night I cleaned. I had let the house go to pot over the last six months and suddenly I wanted it clean again. I started with the bathroom and worked my way through the house: swabbing floors, scrubbing walls, vacuuming, washing clothes, dusting the light fixtures and underneath the beds. Juan would occasionally look in on me, but he didn’t say a word. By midnight I had the house spotless and I didn’t even take a break before starting in on the cooking. I made a huge vat of soup, casseroles, rice and beans, stir fry, whatever I could find in the house. I cooked all night and put the food in Tupperware containers and stuffed them into the refrigerator until it could hold no more.

  By dawn I had a small overnight bag packed with a few of my things. I called everyone I could think of, all of our mutual friends, and explained the situation and asked them to help keep an eye on Juan. I even called the county mental health division and made them promise to send someone over as soon as they could manage it.

  Once I was sure I had done everything there was to do, I went and found Juan in the front room, sitting on the floor with Louise in his lap. He might have been crazy, but he knew exactly what was happening—he grabbed me, pushed his face into my chest and held on tight. I hugged him and told him once more, for the thousandth time, that I loved him. I told him to feed Louise and give her the medicine she needed every two weeks. Juan didn’t say anything at all, just kept his face buried in my neck and finally he let go of me.

  The sun wasn’t quite over the trees when I got into my car and pulled out of the driveway with no clear idea of where I might be headed. I drove slowly down the street, in the direction of the freeway entrance. As I got further from town, out into the sagebrush and piñon pine, even with my heart breaking I felt a sense of freedom I’d never felt before, like a great heaviness falling away, and it was as if I was rising above the road, into the white morning sky, floating.

  Junk Court

  I’m Bach Abercorn, maintenance man at the Cinnamon Ridge Apartments here in Holbrook, Arizona. You break it I fix it, as they say. That’s why I’m late. I was down in my basement shop putting on my Pumas when Ginny the secretary from upstairs called and said someone’s disposal was jammed. I told her I was already late for my game but she kept on saying, emergency, emergency, using the word like a knife to threaten me. So I went up to 12-D and pulled out a Donald Duck baby spoon that was twisted up in the disposal’s blades. This is what I do.

  Now I’ve got my head out the window of my GMC, letting the wind blow my ears back. It is one of those queer summer days in the middle of February and for the first time in ages I’ve got the weight of a woman on my mind. I’m on my way out of Holbrook and into the open spaces of scraggly cedars and piñon pine. Holbrook sits out on the high desert plateaus of northeastern Arizona and is the proud home of petrified wood and dinosaur bones. In movie towns they have wooden Indians in front of their drugstores. We have stoned Indians in front of ours.

  I have to pick up Morris for our Friday hoopfest at the Junk Court. It’s called the Junk Court not only because it is right in the middle of old Redrock Junkyard, but also because of the brand of garbage ball that is played there. No one seems to know why the man who used to own the place built a basketball court in the middle of all the junk. He must have been a real old-fashioned basketball lover. I like to imagine the old guy, whoever he was, silhouetted against the tangled metal, shooting two-handed jumpers in the twilight.

  Morris has a little house out here on the Old Dump road. He sold his Land Cruiser to buy it. Morris says if you don’t have a house, you have nowhere to hang your heart. He’s out on the front lawn, lying on his stomach and reading a book when I come roaring in on a storm of gravel. He’s wearing sunglasses and a bandanna around his head to keep his hair out of his eyes. Morris gives me a huge smile that makes me wince. He’s got a front-tooth gap you can fit four stacked quarters into. When we go out together I remind him to keep the grinning to a minimum.

  Back on the road, Morris says, “You haven’t convinced me.”

  Morris and I argue. That is what our friendship is based on—the conflict of minds. Our current subject is abortion. Morris is trained in debate and uses technique on me. All I have to fall back on is common horse sense. We talk about everything: women, politics, God, the capital gains tax. We make it a point not to agree.

  Right now I can’t think about abortion, can’t formulate any theories. I’ve got sunshine on my nose and the thought of this girl that feels like a wandering tumor in my skull. I saw her yesterday during lunch break at the Rhino’s Horn Inn. She must be a student at the little college in town, Northland Pioneer. She was sitting in the booth across from me, doing her best to eat. She had some kind of disease or condition that made most of her body jerk and twitch. It took her three or four tries before she could get half a forkful of corn in her mouth, her arm and head jerking around like that. I watched her and my throat thickened up and I could hardly breathe. What was it I felt right then? Sadness? Respect? Guilt? Love? Maybe I felt all of them at once, I still can’t say. I got up to give her a hand or say something nice, but instead I turned away and walked right out the door, hurting.

  All this has been banging
around in my head since then. For me to think about one girl for more than fifteen minutes is an amazing thing.

  “I don’t know,” I say and assume a thoughtful look so maybe Morris will understand my state of seriousness.

  “About what?” Morris says.

  I want to explain the whole thing to Morris, tell him what I’m feeling. I have to talk to someone and if I can talk to anyone, it’s Morris. But what do I say to him? Hey, Morris, I saw this girl who has a handicap or a disease or something and I think maybe I love her?

  It just doesn’t work that way.

  When we get to the Junk Court everybody is shooting around waiting for us. I’ll be dammed if I don’t get nervous like I used to when I stood in the dark locker room, needing to pee something fierce and waiting to take the floor for the varsity Holbrook Redskins. We have Indian reservations all around us, Hopi to the northwest, Apache to the south, Navajo to the east. We’re the only non-Indian team in the region and we’re called the Redskins. Morris says the irony is tremendous.

  “Thank you for coming,” my cousin Pacer says. Pacer has blond hair down to his ass and a bad attitude that goes farther than that. When there is a fight he is generally in the middle of it.

  The sun is hot and it feels good to strip off my shirt. Me, Pacer, Chief and John Boy are always skins. We’ve kept the same teams from the very beginning. We match up almost perfect. Right now it is ninety-four games to ninety-one in favor of the shirts. We keep a tally scratched into the hood of an old green Studebaker. A few times the snow or ice storms have stopped us, but we’ve always played right through rain or high winds. One time we played in a pea-soup fog. We were taking shots without being able to see the basket; you just had to get a feel for where the hoop was.

  Juice is down at the other end, hitting set shots from out in the washing machine parts. He has the gift of softness; his shots never seem to rattle the rim. The ball comes down wet, he shoots it so high. He is far and away the most talented of us, but he’s lazy, doesn’t play stiff defense, comes to the games sometimes with a Seagram’s Seven buzz. Juice is haunted by potential. He stole my old girlfriend, got her pregnant, married and divorced her, all in less than a year. Whenever I see him I tell how grateful I am it was him instead of me.

  Chief shoots the do-or-die. We don’t let Juice shoot it anymore because the man just doesn’t miss unless somebody’s got a hand in his face. Chief puts it up, it comes down hard off the back of the iron and Chief dies. Shirts get the ball first. Jimmy Hammond flies low right over us in his little crop duster and we all pause to give him the bird.

  I guard Rabbi, my older brother. Me and Rabbi guarding each other doesn’t do much for our brotherly relationship. We only live a couple of miles away from each other but here at basketball games is the only time I see him. We’re not Cain and Abel, but things could be better.

  Shirts bring the ball up. Mugsy is at the point, smiling and yo-yoing the ball by his hip.

  “What are you grinning at, prick?” says Chief, who is guarding Mugsy.

  “You mothers are smoke,” Mugsy says, his big, bald face shining.

  Mugsy tries to drive the lane but Chief picks him clean and takes the ball down to the other end for an easy lay-up. “Stay out of my kitchen,” Chief roars, “I’m gonna clean up!” Even though Chief is an Indian and should be soft-spoken like the rest of them, he talks more trash than any of us. He is a pleasure to have around, if he’s on your team.

  Francisco is the only one who doesn’t make a lot of noise around here. Francisco is an ex-wetback from Guadalajara who, a few months back, was instantly transformed into a proud American citizen. To him, this simply means that he won’t have to steer clear of the border patrol anymore. Francisco is the only one of us without a nickname. With a name like Francisco who needs one, I say. I am writing a paper about nicknames for my Evolution of the English Language class at Northland Pioneer, where I study off and on. It’s not like we have a drought of nicknames around here. You have to work hard at not having one.

  We all start out jittery, missing our shots and throwing the ball away, but pretty soon we settle in and it’s almost like we’re doing a dance we’ve been practicing for years. Rabbi is really hitting them from outside today and I have to play right in his shorts until he misses a few. When he’s got the ball I keep one hand on his back and the other poking at the ball. He swats my hand away and pushes me back.

  We take a break with the game tied at fifty. Chief is really lighting it up for us, doing the Apache run-and-gun to perfection. He is playing like his idol, Isiah Thomas, spinning and whirling and taking running scoop shots that kiss off the backboard and drop through the bucket with a sweet snap of the net.

  We all have our idols. Mine is Larry Bird. I would kiss the man’s sweaty toes if he would let me. Every time I watch him play it makes me emotional. I shoot the same way he does—flat-footed with the ball cocked by the side of his head. I play hard-nosed, straight-up ball. I used to comb my hair the same way he does. I don’t dunk.

  We lie down in the middle of the court. Sweat rolls off us and makes little puddles in the cement. We pass around the water and Gatorade and look into the sun. Juice sits on a rusty swamp cooler and chugs an Old Milwaukee. Francisco hums Julio Iglesias with feeling.

  “How’s your vacation going?” Morris says to Pacer. They work together at the power plant and do their best to act like they enjoy each other’s company.

  “Been painting my house,” Pacer says, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. “Get this. Yesterday I was taking the storm gutter down and Edna Longley, the little divorced girl who moved in across the street, was out with her platoon of obnoxious kids in front of her house.”

  Pacer goes into this long explanation about how the woman fell to pieces on her front lawn, shrieking and sobbing and tearing the grass up. Turns out Pacer offered to take her kids for awhile and ended up loading them in the back of his truck and hauling them over to the bowling alley to play video games. He takes his time, giving us every detail.

  “The rug rats cost me forty-seven quarters,” Pacer says. “I bought the baby one of them big Tootsie Rolls and it never made a peep.”

  “You took her childs?” Francisco says with that little accent the women love.

  “Damn straight,” Pacer says, looking rather proud. “A woman breaking down like that, somebody had to do something.”

  “Shit,” John Boy says.

  We all contemplate the story Pacer has told us. Nobody knows what to say. Usually we fill the air with talk about sex or sports, something with a joke or a lie in it, nothing serious like this. I wonder if now would be the right time to say something about the girl I saw, but before I can say anything John Boy pipes up about a show he saw on TV last night where a father killed all his children with a propane torch. He finishes with a solemn, “True fucking story.”

  All at once we get up and decide not to endure any more stories.

  We shoot around a bit to find our distance before we get busy again. We huddle and decide our strategy will be to let Chief shoot a lot. This is exactly what happens and Chief carries us home, does us proud.

  When the game is done it’s getting dark and we gather up our things, talking about certain points of the game, letting sweet exhaustion settle into our bones. We get into our trucks and drive away from each other. Skins have won number ninety-two and the momentum is swinging our way like something out of the dark; we are closing the gap.

  Some days I wake up chock-full of impossible questions. This morning, with hot air balloons in the cold sky over the desert, they are not the universal questions I am normally inclined towards. Today they are questions about who I am. Am I the fix-it man who plays basketball and drives a cowboy truck or am I the guy who writes papers at the college and likes poetry written by women who kill themselves? Why can’t I master the cross-over dribble or simple iambic pentameter? Who am I to love a diseased woman I’ve never met?

  I’m fixing coffee and Hann
ah is burning off a hangover in my bed. Hannah is someone I know from my language class. We’ve done study sessions. Last night she went to a party here in the complex and showed up at my door around midnight, doing the Budweiser two-step and asking me if I knew where her car was. I decided letting her stay would be better than scouring hell’s half-acre for her car. She slept on one side of my bed and made high whistling noises through her nose. It reminded me of when Trooper, my black-and-tan hound, used to sleep in bed with me and make the same kind of racket. Even though it’s been three years since Trooper died, it’s a sound that still comforts me.

  Hannah wakes up slowly and takes coffee without saying anything. Her face looks like it needs to be ironed, but I’ve seen worse. I wonder if her brain has kicked in.

  “You were sauced last night, so I took the liberty of removing your shoes, that’s all,” I say.

  “I remember, I remember,” she says. One of her ears is missing its golden hoop.

  “How’s your term paper coming?” I say. The blank look she gives me tells me that I should stop asking questions until she gets everything together. She goes into the bathroom and puts her head under the bathtub faucet. “This will cure me,” she says over the roar of water. She comes out dripping and much fresher. Her curly blond hair is now dark and plastered to her head.

  “I lost a boyfriend yesterday,” she says.

  “Not lost in the dead sense of the word, I hope,” I say.

  “No, just lost as in gone for good,” she says.

  I am not the sort of handyman that James Taylor sings about. I’m not handy with love and I don’t fix broken hearts. Some women just don’t understand this. The women in this complex, most of them college girls, see me with my tools, unclogging a sink or replacing a rusty P-trap and for some reason they think I’m capable of anything. When I’m in their apartments they tell me their problems, ask advice, invite me to dinner, to bed. I’ll always listen and give advice when I can, but I don’t accept many invitations. It’s not the way I was raised.