Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  We arrived just after lunch, a sharp sun pressing down on us, the farmhouse shuttered and locked, flanked on either side by long stretches of gutted pasture. It was October, and Forney told me, as we pulled up the gravel driveway, that the farmers who rented the land from his mother had already started preparing the ground for freezing temperatures. A hard winter had been predicted in this year’s Farmers’ Almanac. It seemed ridiculous to me, the idea of winter, since fall hadn’t even bothered to show up in the first place. Slick greens and summery yellows still shimmered in the pines and oaks. We had come here for the weekend to take a break from the thrumming outside world, to be secluded on all sides by a cathedral of trees.

  While we were unloading the car, a large bearlike dog showed up at the edge of the yard. Silent and watchful, the dog seemed unsure of us, these strangers it’d caught trespassing. I like a dog to be a dog, to bark and huff and wag its tail, and this one’s reluctance to do any of these sort of things unnerved me. All this is to say that I should have known the dog was trouble from the start.

  “Old Hooch,” Forney said. “The bastard lives.”

  Regan took off her sunglasses. “Is it mean?” she asked.

  Forney laughed. “He’s lived with my mother for most of his life. That would make anybody mean.”

  I was staying in Forney’s old room upstairs while he and Regan were taking the master bedroom downstairs. After I put away my things and came back down, Forney and I decided to carry one of the couches in the living room outside. We picked the one that could easily seat three people and toted it through the narrow front door, angling the couch sideways to jimmy it on out. Meanwhile, Regan had disappeared into the kitchen to make us drinks.

  “Let’s test it out,” Forney said, after we had shoved aside some expensive-looking metal rocking chairs and positioned the couch beside the porch swing. “I want to make sure I can sit here and see the sunrise in the morning.” He glanced around him, at the feathering of bushes and shrubs that hid the highway, then at the great empty sky, as if he had never grown up here and was looking at these things for the first time. “This is east, right?” he said, pointing.

  I plopped down beside him on the couch and nodded to my left. “More northeast, I think. Look at the angle of the sun above those pines.”

  He patted my knee. “You know such practical things, Tuck,” he said. “That’s why I’m a poet—I’m completely impractical.”

  While we were talking, Hooch plodded into the yard, its nose close to the ground, following a scent. The dog looked wild: fur mangy, leaves and cockleburs matted deep within the unwashed shag around its chest and rear legs. Forney began to explain the dog’s sad history to me—how his mother had never penned or chained the dog when she first bought it, never bothered to train it either, letting the creature roam the uninterrupted acres of field and the small scratch of woods and riverbed behind the house. His mother had originally bought the dog for security purposes a few years after Forney’s father died and she had some trouble getting rid of one of her boyfriends. Soon, though, she grew tired of it—much as she often did with her boyfriends. “Said she gave it to the woods,” Forney was saying, his legs propped up on the porch railing. “But he always circles back here, like he’s waiting for something. Maybe for someone. Poor son of a bitch.”

  Hearing this, I softened toward the animal and the way its ragged paws clutched at the ground as it slowly mulled about the yard. I got up from the couch and moved to the edge of the porch.

  “Hooch,” I called. “Here, boy.”

  The dog’s floppy ears stiffened. It lifted its boxy head from a clump of monkey grass, meeting my eyes with its own dull black ones. We were just a few feet apart. “Here,” I said again, and held out my hand, wiggling my fingers. “Come on, boy.” The dog crooked its head sideways and began to trot my way like a pony. I noticed the flash of teeth just in time to pull back my hand, and the dog’s jaws made a loud clapping noise as they clamped shut on empty air. I flew backward and landed awkwardly against one of the arms of the couch. Upset, the dog snorted, the first sound I’d heard it make since our arrival.

  “Easy, boy,” Forney said, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or the dog.

  Regan, hearing me fall, had rushed outside. “My god,” she said, speaking to Forney, breathless, “I was watching out the window, and for a minute, I thought I was gonna get to see them two go at it.”

  * * *

  —

  IT’S STILL A WONDER to me that I had become so close to Regan and Forney that first year of college. I’m usually best left to myself, partly because I had no brothers or sisters growing up in Vicksburg and enjoyed the silences that came with being an only child. Other people’s voices, even my parents’, usually made me itchy and nervous or want to hit something. This did not make me very popular in elementary school; it also didn’t help matters much that I was a good foot taller than anyone else in my class. My bigness has always made me suspect. Only in high school, when I started playing football and sending quarterbacks to the emergency room, did I make a few friends. But even then, it was a friendship at a distance. Now I can’t remember one of those boys I used to play with.

  My senior year, I was a behemoth, having to duck or turn sideways to enter most doorways. I had a way of filling up a room, crowding everyone and everything else out. By then, universities had started to take note of how adept I was at running down offensive lines, catching a player just below the rib cage with my helmet so hard and so fast that the impact would leave the player dazed and reeling. Scouts from Auburn and Tennessee and even LSU came to my big show. Oh, it was a heady time before I got hurt.

  During a nonconference game, I made a run for a fumble and a thick bastard with a score to settle clipped me from behind. I fell funny and shattered my left kneecap. Doctor said it was like a metal vice smashing a walnut. In the three seconds it took for me to be brought down, I was done. Three surgeries later, my knee more metal than bone, the scholarships were all dried up, and the world seemed to clap shut almost as fast as it had opened. I realized soon enough that my story wasn’t all that special: The washed-up athlete routine was a cliché even then, and no one, not even my high school coaches, was overly troubled. “Was in your cards, son,” one said, when he came to see me in the hospital. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that. I want to focus on what happened after.

  I ended up going to college anyway, picking the cheapest one I could find, a small regional school in central Mississippi, and majored in general business. College proved to be not quite the same as high school: People still made me nervous, but this time I didn’t have football as a buffer. My bigness didn’t work for me anymore either, and I began to sense that I was disappearing. Little by little, I felt myself dissolving like a cube of sugar in a mug of hot coffee. One day I’d walk out of my dorm room and no one would be able to see me. Naturally, this scared me. But what scared me more was that I looked forward to it, this vanishing. After all, there was a certain kind of peace that came with nothingness.

  Then I became friends with Forney and Regan, and it all changed for me.

  One night, I was in the bathroom, studying for a calculus test and feeling pretty raw about it. I’d made decent enough grades in high school, but I started to suspect that maybe the teachers had helped me along too much, for the sake of football, because I couldn’t understand much of what the math textbook was trying to tell me to do. My roommate, a pale skinny kid who whined about how he missed his hometown and his friends, had turned out the lights and indicated that I needed to find someplace else to study. The library was closed at that hour, and the study hall on our floor usually had too many people in it for me to concentrate, so the bathroom seemed like my best bet.

  Our dormitory was set up to where every two rooms shared a bathroom between them. After about ten minutes of reading about limits and derivatives in the bathroom that connected my room to For
ney’s, I started hearing these muffled cries coming from Forney’s door. It took me a minute to realize that the sounds were those of a girl. The college was very strict about decency and morals, and girls were forbidden from entering a male dormitory. I set my textbook down and listened, not believing that the hawkish-looking boy I lived next door to had a woman in his room and marveling at his ability to smuggle her in. That took talent. After a while, I began to differentiate more subtle noises coming from the room: the plastic squeak of the twin mattress, the fast, wet thump of his body against hers, the wistful voice of the girl calling out his name—his strange name, Forney! Forney!—over and over. I almost laughed. I might have if the whole thing didn’t make me so desperately sad. Here I was, a former all-state defensive tackle, reduced to listening to other people’s lovemaking. What I did next was perhaps most shameful of all: I got up from the toilet. I placed my ear to the door and tried to imagine what the girl looked like. I wondered if she was pretty and hoped she wasn’t.

  The sounds kept going on for some time, getting louder, until someone started banging on the hallway door.

  “Open on up,” the voice said. It was our resident assistant, a pimply prelaw student who took his job seriously. The dorm room went silent, and I leaned in closer to the door, spreading my hands along the frame to balance myself. There was a shuffle of footsteps, some whispers.

  “Who is it?” asked Forney. He was buying time, I knew that much. Some kind of plan was forming in there.

  “You know who, Forney. Open up.”

  When it was too late, I realized that the couple was heading for the door I stood behind. The door opened slowly; they were careful not to make the usual loud clicking noise. Forney shoved the girl inside and shut the door behind her, leaving her alone, wide-eyed and completely naked, staring at me as if I were the one who had intruded on her. I looked away from her body. First at the toilet, which seemed somehow to be more insulting than getting an eyeful, so I moved my eyes to the sink counter instead, focusing on the sight of my textbook.

  I held my hands up, and said, “Just leaving, ma’am,” but the girl shushed me. When I looked at her face, she had put a finger to her lips. A loud conversation was going on behind her through the door. “All your money can’t buy you special privileges, Culpepper,” the resident assistant was saying. “Not here. Not on my floor.” The naked girl and I stood there no more than a few feet apart. I stopped fighting my instinct to be gentlemanly and discreet. Gave into the urge to look at her, to gaze at the way her bare shoulders, the color of warm light, curved into arms; at her round breasts, each kissed with a brown nipple; and farther down, below her waist, at the tuft of hair between her legs, still oozy and gleaming from the sex I’d heard her having. She was the first girl I had ever seen completely in the nude outside of the dirty movie I’d stolen from under one of my cousins’ beds and the Hustlers I’d found in junior high in the toolbox of an abandoned truck by the river. The girls I’d gone to bed with in high school had kept most of their clothes on, as did I. Sex with them had been like a more advanced form of shaking hands, polite and firm but still impersonal.

  The girl watched me watching her. She smiled and curtseyed dramatically. I started to say something when I remembered the trouble they were in. The penalty for having a girl in your room was suspension for a whole semester. The resident assistant was not giving up either. He would soon, after checking under the bed and in the midsize day closet, come for the bathroom, the next obvious place to stash someone in a hurry. In a moment of inspiration, I gestured to the sink, to the box-shaped cabinet below it. The girl nodded, understanding me immediately. She opened the cabinet door and stooped to enter it after blowing me a thank-you kiss. I was charmed.

  The resident assistant barged into the bathroom a few minutes too late and found me sitting on the sink, my face crammed into my textbook, my large legs dangling over the cabinet door. He looked truly puzzled. Forney, however, when he followed the resident assistant into the bathroom, appeared thunderstruck. “Hey,” I said, making my voice sound strained and annoyed.

  “Did you see a girl come in here?” asked the RA.

  “A girl?” I can play dumb really well when I want to.

  Frustrated, the resident assistant turned to Forney, who was shrugging. It was obvious that he had no idea what I was doing there either. If the resident assistant had pressed further, he would have noticed how my hands were trembling as I held the textbook and that my ears were bright red. But my presence had caught him off guard, made him sloppy. He could only shake his head, and he finally ambled out of the bathroom, mumbling something as he left, declaring defeat before I’d have thought he would have. After he was gone, Forney and I waited a couple of minutes before we made our next move, each of us taking the other in. I’d seen him only once before, from across our dorm hall on move-in day. I didn’t think much about him at the time except how jealous I was that he could afford a private room. Now I saw him more closely: He had dark purple circles under his eyes and the lean frame of a running back. Muscular but not bulky like me. When I thought it was safe, I jumped down from the countertop and helped the girl unwind herself from the tiny enclosure under the sink. When upright, she winked at Forney, who now smirked, and then she leaned in close to my neck to kiss me on the cheek. Her lips felt like a damp rag against my face, the kind I would use to wash the grease off from under my eyes after games. “Good thinking, man,” Forney said, and for a moment, both of them smiled.

  “Just look at him,” the girl said.

  “A fucking grizzly.”

  There was a familiar tone in their voices; something I hadn’t heard since getting to college: the sound of awe. It went through me like a heavy wave—the whole Gulf of Mexico was in their voices, bathing me. Then they were gone. I stayed in the bathroom for the rest of the night even though I’d given up studying. I killed the lights and sat on the cool bathroom floor. Forney’s dorm room remained silent, almost as if the two people, once in there, had ceased to exist altogether.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THAT NIGHT in the dorm, I began seeing them around campus more and more. Always in my periphery: in the cafeteria two tables over, in the magazine room at the library, outside on the drill field. Each time, Forney had a book in his hand and wore a serious, strained look on his face as if he were constipated. Most of the time, she was with him, her arm sometimes slung around him in some way or another. She usually wore a long skirt—the kind you see girls from California wearing—and chunky bracelets and rings. Her blue eyes, the most startling thing about her, were usually shielded by aviator sunglasses or thickly coated with eyeliner. The two of them looked like they belonged on an album cover. I think now that maybe they were following me, that we were scoping one another out. We would nod when I passed them, and soon, we started speaking, and then, before I knew it, we were having full-throated conversations.

  From the start, they were a mystery. There are still things about them I don’t know, like how they met, how long they’d been together before I came along. Forney told me once during one of our impromptu talks that he thought of himself as something of a poet, although he’d never written any poems to date. Instead, he spent his mornings retyping the work of other poets—Ginsberg, Stevens—on a sky-blue IBM Correcting Selectric II, the tapping and clanging of that machine so loud at times that I could hear him going at it through the cinder-block walls in my dorm room. His whole poetry thing, all that typing, was something I didn’t get. When I asked him about it, he said, “I’ve not found the right words for me yet, so I’m using other people’s until then.” He had a moony way of talking that could make you think he was pretentious, and I didn’t like him very much at first, not as much as I liked Regan anyway. He surprised me, though, when he got into an argument with my roommate.

  My roommate, Arnold, had a habit of using the hair dryer in the mornings, its loud, hoarse yawl sometimes waking m
e up when the kid had an eight o’clock class. It ticked me off a little. But it drove Forney crazy. One morning, still half-asleep, I heard them in the bathroom arguing. “Fucking messing up my flow,” Forney was saying to him when I made it to the doorway. “I need quiet in the morning, dude.” He was holding my roommate’s Ionic Turbo Styler and wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pajamas. When he saw me, he smiled as if he had been expecting me. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Tucker,” he said. “A man can’t think with all this racket. His precious hair can towel dry.”

  My roommate—now I feel a little sorry for him; he must have been terrified—glanced at me in a way that told me he thought I could save him.

  “He’s sorry,” I told Forney.

  “Wasteful,” Forney said. “Look at the lights.” Forney plugged the hair dryer into the outlet above the sink, and the bulbs dimmed. “See?”

  “I think,” Arnold began, then stopped. Forney had just yanked the hair dryer from the outlet and cracked it in half with his hands as if it were a wishbone. “You broke my hair dryer,” my roommate said. Forney let the pieces fall out of his hand, and they clacked against the tile floor. Arnold turned to me: “He broke my hair dryer.”

  “For your own good,” Forney said, taking the tone of a parent. He had impressed me. I didn’t think the wannabe poet had it in him.

  “Tell him, Tucker,” he said. “Tell him what I mean.”