Letting Loose the Hounds

by Brady Udall

  “May I please say grace?” he says for the third time.

  I give up on my speech and we bow our heads and wait for a few seconds. Instead of saying a prayer, Hugh says the word “grace” very loudly. It takes me a minute to understand the joke and Hugh starts giggling and I laugh too until Hugh cackles so hard he falls off the back of the stool and bangs his head on the radiator. Iris stands up and says, “Oh my God he’s dead.” Tormey doesn’t budge, keeps his head bowed, his eyes squeezed shut.

  I help the little guy up and inspect the back of his head. There is just a small goose egg forming.

  “He’s not dead?” Iris says. She seems disappointed.

  I set Hugh back on his stool and ask him if he’s okay. He says, “I’ve got a skull like a safe deposit box.”

  I tap Tormey on the shoulder to inform him he can begin eating and he goes to work sucking the innards out of a stuffed pepper. The blow seems to have cleared Hugh’s head a little, wiped away some of the cobwebs, and he and I spend the rest of the dinner having a detailed discussion about the political and social effects of the Viet Nam war.

  Hugh, Iris and Tormey are not their real names. When we all met that first day and I found out their names were Dave, Sue and Dave—painfully common and therefore boring ones, in my opinion—I went to Garret’s Used Books and bought a paperback: 20,001 Names for Baby. I thought giving them nicknames might help them gain a fresh perspective, a new lease. I wanted them to feel this was a new beginning rather than another stop down the line. Both Iris and Tormey had spent their later years in old folks homes and with relatives who didn’t really want them, and Hugh, an orphan, had spent his entire existence shuffled along, put up with, unloved. When I proposed my idea about taking on nicknames, they shrugged and said okay, as if I was asking them about switching toilet paper brands.

  We spent an evening going through the book trying out names. Hugh had his heart set on Maximilian, but I convinced him that Hugh, which means “intelligence,” was not only more simple and dignified, but much easier to say. Tormey told me anything was good enough for him, so I decided on his name because it is one I’ve never heard before and I like the meaning listed in the book: “thunder spirit.” Iris’s only wish was to be named after a flower.

  We don’t get much into their pasts; they tell me about theirs if they want to and sometimes I tell them about mine. I have thick files on each of them that I never bother looking at; I’m not a doctor or a psychiatrist, I’m just here to help out, keep things under control. We get to know each other the honest, old-fashioned way: plain old conversation.

  Tormey is a little difficult because he doesn’t like to talk much. All I really know about him is that he grew up on a sheep farm in Oklahoma. His arms and chest are covered with dozens of white, irregular scars. I asked him about them and he told me he got them in a war, he couldn’t remember which one. He has the habit of being quiet for long periods of time, then suddenly letting loose some terrible secret or memory from his past. He catches you unawares with these sometimes ghastly, sometimes heartbreaking pieces of himself, delivering them like blows to the gut. Usually after such an occasion it takes me hours to recover, to function normally again.

  I can remember once down by the creek, gathering kindling for the fireplace, when out of nowhere he turned to me, his eyes exceptionally clear and said, “I killed my son.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I killed my baby boy. Smothered him in his crib with a piece of plastic.”

  “You did not.”

  “You’re such a coward,” he said to me, turned away and walked slowly, deliberate as falling snow, back towards the house.

  I meet Ansie at The Dive for billiards and dinner and when she sees Hugh at my side, she looks at me with this suspicious face, her mouth and eyes forming a silent question.

  Hugh is wearing a white safety helmet, something he will not venture into public without. When he’s not concentrating, he has the tendency to lose his equilibrium. With his head crammed into what amounts to a shiny bowl with straps, and his big ears sticking out from underneath it, he looks like a being from another world.

  I try to explain. “He was watching Salem’s Lot on cable and it spooked him so much he was dead certain that if I left vampires would take over the house. When I got out to my car, he was already strapped in, ready to go.”

  “Alright,” Ansie says, “no big thing,” but the sideways look she’s giving me says otherwise.

  Tonight The Dive is doing good business. On our way to the tables, the boys at the bar, most of them loggers and Forest Service workers, slap hands with Hugh and pat his helmet. They all know him from his window and floor-cleaning job at the post office. He says, “Hey, Bub,” to every one of them.

  We get a corner booth. Hugh sits next to me, his head just above the level of the table.

  “How was your dinner last night?” Ansie says.

  “Magnificent. Better if you had come.”

  Ansie shrugs. She knows I’m trying to make her feel guilty. She told me that guilt is no longer in the repertoire of her emotions. She said that her five failed marriages have something to do with this. Tonight her hair is up in a shimmering blue-black bun and she smells like a women’s magazine. She has a tiny brown face and big white teeth that surprise you when she smiles. We order our dinners and she tells me about the new rifle she bought. She’s hoping to make the draw for the special black-bear hunt next fall. She wants to get her picture in one of those hunting magazines, kneeling next to the corpse of a bear, holding up its head so that the terrible curve of its teeth is visible.

  Hugh, who usually doesn’t pay attention to anything that’s said unless he’s being directly addressed, says, “If we could just kill all the bears we wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore.”

  “You don’t like bears?” Ansie says.

  “Hate ‘em. They have organisms living in their fur. When they maul you they always go right for the head. They like the way it feels when your skull snaps. For them, it’s the most satisfying thing they can do.”

  “How do you know all this?” says Ansie.

  Hugh shrugs. “People know things.”

  “No bear is going to maul me. That’s why I bought a thirty-ought-six.”

  “I hope you blow their guts out,” Hugh says.

  It gladdens me to see these two getting along.

  When the food comes, Hugh puts all his concentration into picking the bits of oregano out of his spaghetti sauce, and Ansie and I continue our conversation. We talk a lot about our ex-marriages. With five to her credit, she can go on forever. I can claim only one previous marriage and that one lasted less than a year. Talking about it with Ansie, it seems I’ve squeezed just about all the juice out of it I can, but she wants more, every last detail. She says the mysteries behind a broken marriage can take years to comprehend.

  Speaking of my ex-wife Molly, she asks, “Now did she ever get strange telephone calls in the middle of the day? Comb your memory. Did you ever hear her whispering on the phone? This is important.”

  “What?”

  “Just try to remember. Take your time.”

  Ansie doesn’t believe what I keep telling her about my eight-month marriage with Molly: we broke up because we wanted different things. I wanted a family, camping in the backyard, little league games, taking the station wagon to the drive-in—the basic, boring, all-American stuff. I wanted to go to my office job someday, hangdog and bleary-eyed, and explain to my co-workers that I’d been up all night with a teething baby. Molly had other things in mind: parties, tours of Europe, a cabin at Tahoe. She had this impossible theory that we shouldn’t have kids until we already had enough money saved to see each kid from infanthood through college. Somehow, we talked only vaguely about these things beforehand; we spent most of our engagement giving each other stupid presents and trying to decide where to go on our honeymoon. It didn’t take long for us to realize that things weren’t going to work. We discussed it like
civilized people, shook hands, and that was the end of it. Ansie simply can’t buy this. In all her considerable experience, marriages do not end with logical decisions, with the shaking of hands. They go down like burning buildings in the pyrotechnics of jealousy and drunkenness, yelling and infidelity, threats and thrown objects. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories this woman has to tell.

  “She wasn’t having an affair,” I say. “We were only married eight months for chrissakes.”

  “Oh, ho,” she says. “My second was out testing the waters after only a few weeks.”

  Ansie wears her marriages like Purple Hearts.

  We get down to eating, and in between bites of tortellini, she gives me a few of the sordid particulars of marriage number four that I haven’t heard yet. I’ve known her five months and as far as her history of relationships is concerned, I think we’ve only scratched the surface. The saga she is relating to me now, the one about one of her ex-husband’s attempts to drain a swamp in Texas and make it into a reptile farm, could be made into a miniseries.

  “His big seller was going to be boas,” she says.

  “I adore these moments,” Hugh says.

  “Who buys snakes?” I wonder.

  “Fucking A,” Hugh says. He’s finished off his spaghetti and is peering through one of the holes in the top of the sugar bottle.

  “Is there something wrong?” Ansie says.

  “I could sure use some aerobics,” Hugh says.

  “I think he wants to go home,” I tell her. “He gets like this.”

  “What about pool? We were going to go double or nothing on that fifty dollars I owe you. I can’t live my life with fifty dollars hanging over my head.”

  “That’s ideology,” says Hugh.

  “You want to play some pool, Hugh?” I say in my enthusiastic, come-on-old-buddy voice. “What do you say about a little eight-ball?”

  This time he doesn’t say anything, just continues eyeballing the sugar, his hands twitching nervously.

  “He wants to go home,” I say.

  “Well, damn,” says Ansie.

  “You got that right,” Hugh says.

  I put my arm around him to calm him down. “Tomorrow night, okay?” I say to Ansie. “Just you and me, head to head, nobody else but the two of us.”

  During the day Iris is a joy to have around. She hums and waters the plants and sometimes bakes a pie or a batch of muffins. But a few times a week, at night when she’s asleep, something goes wrong inside her. Her room is right above mine and I’ll wake up to the muffled screech of bedsprings and a mournful wailing that goes loud and soft, loud and soft, like an air raid siren. I’ll hustle up the stairs and she’ll be in on her bed asleep, twisted in the sheets and producing this unearthly keening that sounds like something from a horror movie. I’ve set up aluminum rails around the bed so she won’t fall off and snap one of her bones, and she’s usually holding onto the rails with both hands, shaking them like someone clamoring to get out of jail, her translucent skin electric in the moonlight. When I take the rail off and sit next to her, she’ll latch on to me, grabbing a hand or an arm with way too much strength for such a fragile body, and I’ll try to shake her awake but usually she won’t come out of it; she’ll be somewhere way off, a place it takes awhile to get back from. I’ve found that picking her up and rocking her slowly in my arms calms her down better than anything. She doesn’t weigh more than eighty pounds and it’s like she’s made of papier mâché—what a hypnotic feeling, holding another human being in your arms while they sleep, rocking them in the dark. Once she stops wailing completely, she wakes up, muttering and lost, and I’ll lay her down and she’ll be back to sleep within seconds. In the morning she won’t remember a thing.

  I’m almost never able to get to sleep after one of these occasions so I’ll just stay in her room, sitting in her cherry wood rocker, listening to the soft pulse of her breathing. Simply being in her presence, innocent and unaware as it might be, gives me a full, settled feeling, the opposite of loneliness.

  Ansie has just finished drubbing me in eight-ball and we’re sitting in her truck outside my house, listening to a pack of ravens squawking in the shadows of an old elm down by the river. Mrs. Loder, the woman I pay to look after things when I’m out, is watching television in the front room where pieces of colored light skitter across the glass of the bay window.

  I walked into The Dive fifty dollars on the plus side tonight and now I’m two hundred down. Ansie was unconscious, she could have made Willie Mosconi look like a pissant. For some reason it seems that all this success on the pool table has saddened her. She has both elbows and her forehead pushing against the steering wheel as if she intends to shove the whole steering column into the engine block. Her new gun is in the rack behind our heads, displayed in the back window like a menacing work of art.

  “I don’t know what I want,” she says.

  She is hitting on another of our favorite topics: our reluctant advance into middle age, our loss of direction and desire. I’d like to come up with something consoling or wise to say to her, but I have nothing except the trite clichés you hear in the movies time and time again.

  “I used to want everything,” she says. “You name it, I wanted it. That was enough for me, it was all I could handle.”

  I haven’t seen her like this before. When we talk to each other, even about our failings, she always laughs and shakes her head, smiling, as if we’re talking about one of those ridiculous soap operas on TV.

  The only other truly solemn conversation I can remember us having was the first time we met. It was at a Labor Day celebration at the city park, and we ended up sitting together on a picnic table, both of us a little drunk, waiting for the fireworks to start. After a half-hour of chitchat, she suddenly announced that before we proceeded any further she wanted to get something out of the way: she had been married five times and was unable to bear children. This kind of confession from a woman I hardly knew made me feel somehow responsible to come up with a few intimate revelations of my own. I told her about my parents who resent me, their only living child, for not providing them with any grandchildren. I even told her about my brother Aaron who died just a few days after birth, how he shows up as an adult in my dreams from time to time, driving around naked in a convertible, gleeful and blowing on a long silver trumpet, yelling at me that I’m missing all the fun. We laughed about that—huge, engulfing laughs like sobs—and we’ve never gotten dramatically somber and serious with each other since.

  “What about you?” she says now, fiddling with a knob on the radio. “Talk, say something.”

  “I used to want to play point guard for the Celtics,” I say. “I was a hell of a dribbler at one time.”

  Ansie grunts and socks me on the shoulder, hard enough to leave a small knot of pain.

  “Let’s go inside,” I say. “Have some coffee or something.”

  Ansie drags her fingers through her hair and looks at me. It’s too dark to read her expression.

  “It’s late,” I say. “I’m sure nobody’s up there except Mrs. Loder. How can we call this a friendship when you won’t even come into my house? I try to visit yours on a regular basis. What are you going to make me do, drag you in there?”

  “Technically,” she says, “this is not your house.”

  She wants an argument, a reason to stay in the truck, but I won’t give her one. I get out and head for the house. “Come on,” I say from the front steps. “Don’t be a coward.”

  Mrs. Loder, a logger’s wife who lives in a tiny trailer with her massive husband and three sons and consequently loves coming over any time she can, meets me at the door with a sleep-pressed face. Her hair looks like something that jumped out of the weeds and attacked her. She shuffles out to her car and Ansie steps inside, looking around, rubbing her hands nervously.

  Ansie follows me up the stairs to check on everyone; it’s clear she doesn’t want to be left alone in this house. We look in on Iris first, and toni
ght it appears she has been blessed with sweet dreams or no dreams at all; against the blue-white pillowcase her face looks serene, smooth, almost youthful. Next is Tormey and he’s ramrod straight under the covers, like a long-dead Egyptian king. When we poke our heads in the door he says, “Boo.” Tormey simply doesn’t sleep. He wanders the house most of the night, his old muscles creaking and popping like worn-out rubber bands and once in awhile it seems, like now, he climbs into bed just for old time’s sake. He’s up and dressed at the kitchen table by four o’clock every morning, waiting for one more sunrise. His watery eyes twinkle at us when he says good night.

  Hugh is not in his bed and we find him asleep in the closet, burrowed under a pile of shoes, driven there by who-knows-what, maybe nightmares of bears coming out of the woods to gnaw on his skull. He wakes up halfway, saying that he’s thirsty, and Ansie goes to get him a drink of water while I put him back to bed. His eyes still closed, he takes the glass and pours the whole thing on his face. He sputters and coughs and goes right back to sleep, his face mashed into the sodden pillow, mumbling something about the wide open sea.

  I make some coffee and we sit at the kitchen table and shoot the bull. The sadness that hung around Ansie out in the truck gradually falls away and I listen to another of her marriage-slash-war stories until Tormey shows up in his suit and tie, reminding us how late it is.

  We are going to the Grand Canyon. I have never had spring fever like this. I feel like I just have to go, it doesn’t matter where. Yesterday morning I went out into the aspens and started running full tilt through the underbrush, dodging trees like a halfback, bounding over stumps, branches whipping me in the face. My lungs were on fire, my legs like jelly when I tripped on something and fell against an old slash pile, getting a long, jagged scratch on my belly in the process. God, did it feel good.

  Except for Tormey, we are all natives of Arizona and none of us has ever been to the Grand Canyon. At least Hugh and Iris have no memory of ever visiting the place. It’s amazing, really: one of the seven natural wonders of the world and I’ve never gotten up off my ass long enough to go have a look.