Letting Loose the Hounds

by Brady Udall

  I think about Rabbi up north of the border. I imagine him in overalls and a big hat, holding up a pan of dirt speckled with gold. He has a rough beard and he cooks pork and beans over a campfire and eats it out of the can. I wonder if he misses the basketball.

  I look through my glove compartment, thinking there might be a spare key in there. All I find are lottery tickets, gum wrappers and a map of Mexico that smells like beer. I sit back and take account of everything I know. I know there are things waiting to be fixed. I know that Victoria will never know my name and that there will be a game at the Junk Court next week, same place, same time. As for things I know for sure, this is as far as it goes.

  The rest I can’t be sure of. Maybe I’ll find my keys. Maybe I’ll go home and Hannah will be there in the kitchen with white sunlight in her face, fixing hash browns and sausage and wondering where I’ve been. Maybe I’ll tell her to leave, or ask her to stay for good, I just can’t say. Maybe I’ll tell her to pack up her things because we’re going to the Yukon to get my tent back.

  Letting Loose the Hounds

  Goody Yates was a mess. He shambled along the side of the road, slump-shouldered and bleeding from the mouth, his head stuffed with cotton, pain and delirium duking it out in the pit of his mind. He didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, barely knew who he was, but the one thing he did know was this: if he didn’t get some relief soon, if the pain in his head continued to attack him like the firebreathing beast it was, he was going to throw himself under the wheels of a passing car, just go right ahead and end the whole damn thing.

  There had been something keeping the agony in check, something that had numbed everything, settled over his brain like heavy mist, white and soothing, but now it seemed to be wearing off. Goody whimpered like a baby and swallowed a mouthful of blood.

  A primer-gray El Camino pulled over next to him, spraying gravel. “Why are you standing in a ditch?” somebody inside the car wanted to know.

  Goody hadn’t realized that he was in a ditch, but he looked down and sure enough, there he was in a weed-clogged ditch. He wished to God there was some water in the ditch. He was hotter than hell.

  “You okay?” the person in the El Camino said. “Did somebody lay you upside? Your face looks like a pumpkin.”

  Goody tried to tell the guy to fuck off but he couldn’t seem to talk. He made a try at opening his mouth which set the nerves in his jaw smoldering like lit fuses.

  “Stand up out of that ditch and get in the car,” the man said. “I’ll give you a lift. You appear to me like a person who needs help.”

  Goody had to agree. He needed a lot of help. He was in bad shape all the way around. He got in the car and was able to get a view of this guy for the first time. He looked like a squat, grizzled version of General Custer: the handle-bar mustache, the longish golden-blond hair waving out from under a stained Peterbilt baseball cap. Cool green hungover eyes.

  They started back onto the road, the El Camino belching and shuddering like a sick old man. Empty beer cans and rifle shells rolled around on the floor.

  “Where to?” Custer said, his voice full of cigarettes. “Hospitals are good in situations like this.”

  Goody shook his head, which was a mistake; fireworks went off in front of his eyes. He didn’t want to go to a hospital. If he knew anything at all, it was that hospitals cost money and one thing he did not have in this world was money.

  He leaned back and put his head against the top of the seat and watched the pine trees zipping past. The steady lug-lug-lug of the car’s engine soothed him. He heard Custer talking but couldn’t make out the words. He felt like he was falling down a very deep hole and before he had time enough to be grateful, he’d passed into sleep.

  When Goody woke he found himself in a whole new universe of pain. The haze in his head had cleared up considerably, which was not a good thing; everything was as clear and excruciating as it could be. He was so hot it felt like his clothes were rotting off him. Custer helped him out of the car and the only thing Goody could think was: I want to die, I really would prefer to die. Custer stood him up, waited for him to get his balance and led him onto the porch of a small house, a cabin really, all by itself in the middle of a saltgrass meadow, set up on blocks off the muddy ground and surrounded by ponderosa pines. Next to the house was an orange Le Mans sedan and a large, chain-link kennel where a bunch of hounds—fifteen or twenty—stretched out in the afternoon sun.

  Custer rattled the handle on the screen door, which was stuck, and finally, unable to get it to work, yanked the entire door off its hinges and sailed it over the porch railing and into the mud. Inside there were various broken objects scattered around: a splintered chair, a coffee table which appeared to have been sawn in half, an old-time jukebox with its electronic guts spilling out. In one corner of the living room were stacked a bunch of wooden milk crates filled with odds and ends. After helping Goody onto a small couch missing its cushions—the only intact piece of furniture in the room—Custer handed him a pink slip of paper and said, “You dropped this in the car when you fell asleep.”

  The paper was crumpled and stained and at the top was printed: H. Felix Manderberry, D.D.S., 149 South Mountain Road, Alpine, Arizona. (602) 337-2093. Underneath, in the kind of indecipherable longhand doctors and dentists are known for, was a prescription for something, Goody couldn’t tell what. As soon as he saw the prescription he remembered, as if recalling a dream: earlier today, possibly only an hour or so ago, this dentist, this H. Felix Manderberry, had fed sodium pentobarbital into his veins and removed four impacted wisdom teeth from Goody’s mouth. He remembered waking up in the chair and some nurse looming above him in the harsh light, asking: Are you awake Mr. Yates, can you open your eyes? She handed him the prescription and went on, giving her prepared speech on what foods he could eat, when to take the medication, and so forth. Goody hardly got any of it; it was like he heard everything, but the moment the words entered his brain they just fell away. She left him, telling him to stay put for awhile until he felt fully himself, but Goody got right up and off he went, still caught in a fuzzy sleepworld, floating past the reception desk and the jittery, hand-wringing folks in the waiting room, opening the door to the outside, the mountain sun slapping him hard in the face. The next thing was getting into the El Camino and now here he was, in a remote cabin with Custer.

  “First I thought you were a handicapped person that somebody had knocked around. I almost did something stupid like call the police, but then I saw this paper. Did they yank out all your teeth? Seriously, friend, you should see this, you’ve got a dirty dinner plate for a face.”

  Custer stomped around, looking for something, then went back into the bathroom. Goody heard a loud, wrenching groan and Custer came out with a mirror-medicine chest, plaster dust still falling from the screws that had secured it to the wall. He held the mirror in front of Goody.

  “Take a look,” Custer said. “They must have done some butcher work on you.”

  Goody’s face was an unrecognizable lump of puffed-up flesh. Purple bruises had begun to show under his eyes and his face was so swollen his jaws were clamped shut. He had never seen anything so pathetic and obscene.

  Custer said, “You didn’t pick up your prescription, did you? I can tell you’re ailing. Tooth pain is the worst there is.”

  Goody tried to form words without moving his jaw, but his tongue was as thick and dry as a balled-up tube sock and there was blood-clotted gauze still packed into the craters where his teeth used to be. “Uhhggl Gaawwd,” was the best he could do. Finally, using half-assed hand gestures, he asked for something to write with. Custer searched and searched but the only writing utensil he could come up with was a fat blue marker. There wasn’t a sheet of paper in sight.

  “Just go ahead and write on the wall,” Custer said, lighting up a cigarette. “I’m going to burn this place down soon enough anyway. Can’t even stand the sight of it anymore.”

  With only a slight hesitat
ion, Goody turned and wrote on the wall above the couch, wisdom teeth no drugs you got anything?

  Custer squatted, opened the medicine cabinet, which was now on the floor, and surveyed its contents. A dusty shaft of sunlight coming through one of the windows fell on his blond hair, making it shine with a kind of soft, angelic glow. “She took most of her pills with her when she left. Oh, she loved her pills, by God.” He began picking up small brown bottles, squinting to read their labels. “Something for toenail fungus, stool softener, Demerol, Dexedrine something-or-other—shit, I don’t know what this stuff is. I’ve never swallowed a pill in my life. Hold on a second.” He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Wild Turkey, took a swig before handing it to Goody. “See if you can get some of this into you and I’ll give this dentist a call so we can find out what in hell to do.” He took the prescription and went back in the kitchen where the phone was.

  Goody unscrewed the cap on the bottle, tilted back his head and did his best to pour some whiskey through his teeth, but there was still the problem of the clumps of gauze. Fuck it, he thought and gagged the gauze down. Misery had pushed him into a state of complete disregard.

  One thing was certain: if he ever saw this Manderberry character again he’d reciprocate some of this pain. He’d known people who’d had their wisdom teeth out and were running around chewing on pretzels and candy apples the next day. Sure, sometimes there was some swelling, a little discomfort, but, good Lord, how could it be this bad?

  Manderberry was a friend of his father—just the thought of it all, the whole twisted junk heap of his life, made him want to puke. Goody was twenty-eight years old, slashed, burned and abandoned by his girlfriend of seven years, up to his eyebrows in debt, and going into the Army in two weeks’ time. Once there was no longer any doubt in his mind that his life was an irretrievable failure, he’d considered suicide but decided on the Army instead.

  It was his father, a World War II vet with a wide and varied collection of medals, ribbons and patriotic lies, who convinced him to sign up. His father had told him that the Army dentists were assembly-line hack artists and if he needed any dental work done he should do it before he joined. Manderberry owed a favor to his father, who arranged the surgery at no cost to his son. In the carefree, oblivious years following high school, Goody’s parents had supported him almost completely, but six years ago pulled the plug on him, telling him it was time to make his own way. His father had even helped him take out a loan to start his own landscaping business, but the whole thing went belly up. He tried again, this time with a pawn shop and with the same result: out of business in less than a year. Now he was the janitor at Speaking Pines Country Club, earning two dollars over minimum wage and cleaning up after puckered old men (including his father) who, when they pissed, had great difficulty reaching the urinal. He lived in the basement of a hardware store and his meal of choice was rice with ketchup on top. He was drunk much of the time, always lonely (all his high school friends gone away, moved on) and his most common fantasy consisted of punching out just about everyone he knew.

  Nights, when he wasn’t haunting the bars, he sat at his rickety table in the posture of some sullen, self-taught philosopher, writing long fuming letters to his ex-girlfriend, Dottie, who, just over a year ago, had become pregnant by him, aborted the baby without letting him know, and had run off to Phoenix, taking his torn and bleeding heart with her.

  This is what was left of his life: He would give his four years to Uncle Sam, make enough money on the GI Bill to pay for college, and maybe by the time he was forty he’d be able to get a good job so he could start paying off all his debts. It seemed entirely fitting that such a sad and ridiculous fuck-up as himself could go in for a simple dental procedure and end up like this.

  He heard Custer tell Manderberry’s secretary that he didn’t give a good goddamn that the dentist was on his way out at this moment. He needed to speak with him right away. It was a bona fide emergency.

  “Mr. Dentist?” Goody heard him say. “Well, my friend here”—he dragged the phone and its cord out into the living room and Goody wrote Goody Yates on the wall—“Goody, he’s been given the dirty deal. Apparently you did a hatchet job on his wisdom teeth and then let him wander out into the street still loopy on the gas. I picked him up on fifth north, didn’t know where he was, bleeding out of the mouth. Now his face is so swole up he can’t open his mouth and he’s suffering like a goddamn Christian. I guess you didn’t give him any painkillers, either.”

  Just then there was a long howl and the scratch-and-snarl sound of dogs fighting. It sounded like only two or three dogs to begin with, then escalated into a kennel-wide brawl: growling and yelping and clicking teeth. Goody could hear Custer trying to talk over the racket for a good thirty seconds before slamming down the phone, sticking his head out the window—the stench of dog shit coming through—and bellowing, “Hah, hah, hah, hah, HAH!”

  Instant silence. One of the dogs ventured a weak whine, but that was it. Custer, red-faced and fierce, went back to the phone but nobody was on the line. “I told him to wait a second but the chickenshit must have run off. I was truly prepared to lay into that sucker. Seems like I can’t do anything without having some kind of commotion from them,” Custer said, pointing to the window. “I’ve been off the mountain eight days now and they’re going stir-crazy. I’ve got a black-and-tan bitch out there, Lucy, she’s the one causing all the calamity. She has to be out on a trail every few days or she gets bored and starts bullyragging the boys.”

  Goody kept tipping up the whiskey, getting it all over his face, letting it run down his neck. He was practically showering in it. He was feeling a little better now. The pain was there, red-hot as ever, but he didn’t seem to notice it as much. He offered the bottle to Custer who took another stiff swallow.

  “You and me, Goody,” Custer said, wiping his mouth. “Been a good three months since I had someone to swap the shit with. Even if you have to write your comments on the wall like a graffiti artist.” He pulled a milk crate from the corner, emptied out its contents on the floor—a blow dryer, a box of Kleenex, dozens of bottles of nail polish—and sat down in front of Goody. “I should tell you, before your dentist buddy got away I told him what drugs we had in the house and he said Demerol, two tablets every four hours, should get you through until you can make it to the pharmacy. He said it’s your fault for walking out still under the gas. He said he won’t accept responsibility for anything because he has the best lawyer in the county.”

  Goody wrote, I’ll piss in his gas tank.

  “There you go. Yes. Subversive activity, they call it. That’s the way you have to conduct these things.” He found the bottle of Demerol and opened it for Goody. It took all the whiskey-fortitude Goody had to fight back the ache in his jaw, to open his mouth just wide enough to get the tiny BB-sized pills past his teeth. Once he had downed the pills he relaxed, quit tensing himself against the pain. Just the possibility of relief was enough for him.

  Goody wrote on the wall, God bless the pharmacy.

  Custer took a long drag on his cigarette like he was gaining vital nutrients from it. Even though the dogs had quieted down, Goody could still hear them, just outside the window, breathing and shifting, a single lurking presence.

  After a while Goody wrote, Why so many dogs?

  “I hunt lions,” Custer said.

  Goody raised his eyebrows and Custer explained that he hunted and killed mountain lions for a living, that he had a permanent camp up in the Blue Wilderness Area where he stayed seven months out of the year. Right now the place was crawling with lions, lions that were killing an inordinate number of livestock; the Arizona Fish and Game had done a lousy job of wildlife management over the past few years, issuing multiple deer permits and severely limiting the lion hunts. Now everything was out of whack; the lions, who didn’t have much choice, admittedly, were taking livestock—even the shy black bears were coming out of the woods to drag calves away—and the ranc
hers were paying good money to have the predators killed.

  Goody hadn’t noticed until now, but it seemed that Custer spoke with a slight southern drawl. You from Texas? he wrote.

  “Please, Lord, no,” Custer said. “Louisiana. When we moved out here I had it in my head I was going to join the Forest Service, you know, driving around in a jeep with a goofy hat on, being kind to trees. And now look at me. Just last week my dogs got a big she-cat in a juniper tree and the branch broke out from under her. She killed four of my boys before the rest tore her to pieces. By the time I got there the only recognizable thing they’d left me to verify the kill with was a right foreleg. I just about didn’t get my money on that one, but that rancher ended up paying me because he knows I’ve got the best trained dogs around, and he might need us again. These dogs, loud and obnoxious as they are, are the best pack in the southern Rockies. They’ll go after any scent I set them to—bear, bobcat, lion—don’t matter, and they’ll kill it if they can. They know I don’t like the killing part so much, so sometimes they take care of it for me.”

  Goody didn’t know what to say to that, so he just sat there, rolling the marker between his palms.

  “Yeah, shit,” Custer said, standing up and walking in a tight circle, smoothing his mustache with both forefingers. The sun was dipping behind the trees and shadows were beginning to eat up the room.

  They sat there for awhile, facing each other, and Goody wrote, You live with somebody else here?

  Custer seemed to read the sentence over five or six times. At first his face was blank but then it fell into a broken, cheerless smile. “Used to,” was all he said. He got up again and stared at a spot on the wall, the smile sticking to his face like something that did not belong there. Goody was immediately sorry he’d asked the question.