by Brad Watson
Because at first I wasn’t cheating on Lois. Things had become distant in the way they do after a marriage struggles through passionate possessive love and into the heartbreak of languishing love, before the vague incestuous love of the long-together. I got home one night when Lois and I were still together, heard something scramble on the living-room floor, and looked over to see this trembling thing shaped like a drawn bow, long needle-nose face looking at me as if over reading glasses, nose down, eyes up, cowed. He was aging. I eased over to him and pulled back ever so softly when as I reached my hand over he showed just a speck of white tooth along his black lip.
“I read that story in the Journal about them, and what happens to them when they can’t race anymore,” she said. She’d simply called up the dog track, gone out to a kennel, and taken her pick.
She said since he was getting old, maybe he wouldn’t be hard to control, and besides, she thought maybe I missed having a dog. It was an attempt, I guess, to make a connection. Or it was the administration of an opiate. I don’t really know.
To exercise Spike, the retired greyhound, and to encourage a friendship between him and me, Lois had the two of us, man and dog, take up jogging. We’d go to the high school track, and Spike loved it. He’d trot about on the football field, snuffling here and there. Once he surprised and caught a real rabbit, and tore it to pieces. It must have brought back memories of his training days. You wouldn’t think a racing dog could be like a pet dog, foolish and simple and friendly. But Spike was okay. We were pals. And then, after all the weeks it took Spike and me to get back into shape, and after the incidental way in which my affair with Imelda down the street began out of our meeting and jogging together around the otherwise empty track, after weeks of capping our jog with a romp on the foam-rubber pole vault mattress just beyond the goalposts, Lois bicycled down to get me one night and rode silently up as Imelda and I lay naked except for our jogging shoes on the pole vault mattress, cooling down, Spike curled up at our feet. As she glided to a stop on the bicycle, Spike raised his head and wagged his tail. Seeing his true innocence, I felt a heavy knot form in my chest. When Lois just as silently turned the bicycle and pedaled away, Spike rose, stretched, and followed her home. Imelda and I hadn’t moved.
“Oh, shit,” Imelda said. “Well, I guess it’s all over.”
Imelda merely meant our affair, since her husband was a Navy dentist on a cruise in the Mediterranean, which had put Imelda temporarily in her parents’ hometown, temporarily writing features for the Journal, and temporarily having an affair with me. It was Imelda’s story on greyhounds that Lois had seen. It was Imelda who said she wanted to meet Spike, and it was I who knew exactly how this would go and gave in to the inexorable flow of it, combining our passive wills toward this very moment. And it was I who had to go home to Lois now that my marriage was ruined.
IMELDA LEFT, AND I LAY THERE AWHILE LOOKING UP AT the stars. It was early October, and straight up I could see the bright clusters of Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Cygnus, and off to the right broad Hercules, in his flexing stance. I remembered how Lois and I used to make up constellations: there’s my boss, she’d say, scratching his balls. There’s Reagan’s brain, she’d say. Where? The dim one. Where? That was the joke. Looking up at night usually made me feel as big as the sky, but now I felt like I was floating among them and lost. I got up and started the walk home. There was a little chill in the air, and the drying sweat tightened my skin. I smelled Imelda on my hands and wafting up from my shorts.
The door was unlocked. The lamp was on in the comer of the living room. The night-light was on in the hallway. I took off my running shoes and walked quietly down the hallway to the bedroom. I could see in the dim light that Lois was in bed, either asleep or pretending to be, facing the wall, her back to the doorway, the covers pulled up to her ears. She was still.
From my side of the bed, Spike watched me sleepily, stretched out, his head resting on his paws. I don’t imagine I’d have had the courage to climb into bed and beg forgiveness, anyway. But seeing Spike already there made things clearer, and I crept back out to the den and onto the couch. I curled up beneath a small lap blanket and only then exhaled, breathing very carefully.
When I awoke stiff and guilty the next morning, Lois and Spike were gone. Some time around midafternoon, she came home alone. She was wearing a pair of my old torn jeans and a baggy flannel shirt and a Braves cap pulled down over her eyes. We didn’t speak. I went out into the garage and cleaned out junk that had been there for a couple of years, hauled it off to the dump in the truck, then came in and showered.
I smelled something delicious cooking in the kitchen. When I’d dressed and come out of the bedroom, the house was lighted only by a soft flickering from the dining room. Lois sat at her end of the table alone, eating. She paid me no attention as I stood in the doorway.
“Lois,” I said. “Where’s Spike?”
She cut a piece of pork roast and chewed for a moment. Her hair was wet and combed straight back off her forehead. She wore eye makeup, bringing out the depth and what I have only a few times truly recognized as the astonishing beauty of her deep green eyes. Her polished nails glistened in the candlelight.
The table was set with our good china and silver and a very nice meal. She seemed like someone I’d only now just met, whom I’d walked in on by her own design. She looked at me, and my heart sank, and the knot that had formed in my chest the night before began to dissolve into sorrow.
“He was getting pretty old,” she said. She took a sip of wine, which was an expensive bottle we’d saved for a special occasion. “I had him put to sleep.”
I’M SURPRISED AT HOW OFTEN DOGS MAKE THE NEWS. There was the one about the dog elected mayor of a town in California. And another about a dog that could play the piano, I believe he was a schnauzer. More often, though, they’re involved in criminal cases—dog bitings, dog pack attacks on children. I’ve seen several stories about dogs who shoot their masters. There was one of these in the stack of old Mobile Registers in the front room. “Dog Shoots, Kills Master,” the headline read. Way back in ’59. How could you not read a story like that? The man carried his shotguns in his car. He stopped to talk to his relative on the road and let the dogs run. When his relative walked on, the man called his dogs. One of them jumped into the backseat and hit the trigger on a gun, which discharged and struck him “below the stomach,” the article said. The man hollered to his relative, “I’m shot!” and fell over in the ditch.
There was another article called “Death Row Dog,” about a dog that had killed so many cats in his neighborhood that a judge sentenced him to death. And another one sentenced to be moved to the country or die, just because he barked so much. There was another one like that just this year, about a condemned biter that won a last-minute reprieve. I’m told in medieval times animals were regularly put on trial, with witnesses and testimony and so forth. But it is relatively rare today.
One story, my favorite, was headlined “Dog Lady Claims Close Encounter.” It was about an old woman who lived alone with about forty-two dogs. Strays were drawn to her house, whereupon they disappeared from the streets forever. At night, when sirens passed on the streets of the town, a great howling rose from inside her walls. Then one day, the dogs’ barking kept on and on, raising a racket like they’d never done before. It went on all day, all that night, and was still going the next day. People passing the house on the sidewalk heard things slamming against the doors, saw dog claws scratching at the windowpanes, teeth gnawing at the sashes. Finally, the police broke in. Dogs burst through the open door never to be seen again. Trembling skeletons, who wouldn’t eat their own kind, crouched in the comers, behind chairs. Dog shit everywhere, the stench was awful. They found dead dogs in the basement freezer, little shit dogs whole and bigger ones cut up into parts. Police started looking around for the woman’s gnawed-up corpse, but she was nowhere to be found.
At first they thought the starving dogs had eaten her up: clothes, skin, hai
r, muscle, and bone. But then, four days later, some hunters found her wandering naked out by a reservoir, all scratched up, disoriented.
She’d been abducted, she said, and described tall creatures with the heads of dogs, who licked her hands and sniffed her privates.
“They took me away in their ship,” she said. “On the dog star, it’s them that owns us. These here,” she said, sweeping her arm about to indicate Earth, “they ain’t nothing compared to them dogs.”
ON A WARM AFTERNOON IN NOVEMBER, A BEAUTIFUL breezy Indian summer day, the wind steered Lois somehow in her Volkswagen up to the house. She’d been driving around. I got a couple of beers from the fridge and we sat out back sipping them, not talking. Then we sat there looking at each other for a little while. We drank a couple more beers. A rosy sun ticked down behind the old grove on the far side of the field and light softened, began to blue. The dogs’ tails moved like periscopes through the tall grass.
“Want to walk?” I said.
“Okay.”
The dogs trotted up as we climbed through the barbed-wire fence, then bounded ahead, leaping like deer over stands of grass. Lois stopped out in the middle of the field and slipped her hands in the pockets of my jeans.
“I missed you,” she said. She shook her head. “I sure as hell didn’t want to.”
“Well,” I said. “I know.” Anger over Spike rose in me then, but I held my tongue. “I missed you, too,” I said. She looked at me with anger and desire.
We knelt down. I rolled in the grass, flattening a little bed. We attacked each other. Kissing her, I felt like I wanted to eat her alive. I took big soft bites of her breasts, which were heavy and smooth. She gripped my waist with her nails, pulled hard at me, kicked my ass with her heels, bit my shoulders, and pulled my hair so hard I cried out. After we’d caught our breath, she pushed me off of her like a sack of feed corn.
We lay on our backs. The sky was empty. It was all we could see, with the grass so high around us. We didn’t talk for a while, and then Lois began to tell me what had happened at the yet’s. She told me how she’d held Spike while the vet gave him the injection.
“I guess he just thought he was getting more shots,” she said. “Like when I first took him in.”
She said Spike was so good, he didn’t fight it. He looked at her when she placed her hands on him to hold him down. He was frightened, and didn’t wag his tail. And she was already starting to cry, she said. The vet asked her if she was sure this was what she wanted to do. She nodded her head. He gave Spike the shot.
She was crying as she told me this.
“He laid down his head and closed his eyes,” she said. “And then, with my hands on him like that, I tried to pull him back to me. Back to us.” She said, No, Spike, don’t go. She pleaded with him not to die. The vet was upset and said some words to her and left the room in anger, left her alone in her grief. And when it was over, she had a sense of not knowing where she was for a moment. Sitting on the floor in there alone with the strong smell of flea killer and antiseptic, and the white of the floor and walls and the stainless steel of the examination table where Spike had died and where he lay now, and in that moment he was everything she had ever loved.
She drained the beer can, wiping her eyes. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I just wanted to hurt you. I didn’t realize how much it would hurt me.”
She shook her head.
“And now I can’t forgive you,” she said. “Or me.”
IN THE OLD DAYS WHEN HAROLD WAS STILL WITH WESTLEY and I was still with Lois, Harold had thrown big cook-out parties. He had a pit we’d dug for slow-cooking whole pigs, a brick grill for chickens, and a smoker made from an old oil drum. So one crisp evening late in bird season, to reestablish some of the old joy of life, Harold set up another one and a lot of our old friends and acquaintances came. Then Phelan showed up, drunk, with the head of a pig he’d bought at the slaughterhouse. He’d heard you could buy the head of a pig and after an afternoon at the Blind Horse he thought it would be interesting bring one to the barbecue. He insisted on putting it into the smoker, so it would have made a scene to stop him. Every half hour or so, he opened the lid with a flourish and checked the head. The pig’s eyelids shrank and opened halfway, the eyes turned translucent. Its hide leaked beaded moisture and turned a doughy pale. People lost their appetites. Many became quiet and left. “I’m sorry,” Phelan stood on the porch and announced as they left, stood there like Marc Antony in Shakespeare. “No need to go. I’ve come to bury this pig, not to eat him.”
Finally Harold took the pig’s head from the smoker and threw it out onto the far edge of the yard, and Phelan stood over it a minute, reciting some lines from Tennyson. Ike and Otis went sniffing up, sniffing, their eyes like brown marbles. They backed off and sat just outside of the porch light and watched the pig’s head steaming in the grass as if it had dropped screaming through the atmosphere and plopped into the yard, an alien thing, now cooling, a new part of the landscape, a new mystery evolving, a new thing in the world, there whenever they rounded the comer, still there, stinking and mute, until Harold buried it out in the field. After that we pretty much kept to ourselves.
We passed our winter boarded up in the house, the cracks beneath doors and around windows and in the walls stuffed with old horse blankets and newspaper and wads of clothing falling apart at the seams, the space heaters hissing in the tall-ceilinged rooms. We went out for whiskey and dry goods and meat, occasionally stopped by the Blind Horse of an early afternoon, but spent our evenings at home. We wrote letters to those we loved and missed and planned spring reunions when possible. Harold’s once-illicit lover, Sophia the surveyor, came by a few times. I wrote Lois, but received no reply. I wrote to my editor at the Journal and asked to return in the late spring, but it may be that I should move on.
It is March just now, when the ancients sacrificed young dogs and men to the crop and mixed the blood with the com. Harold is thinking of planting some beans. We’ve scattered the astonished heads of bream in the soil, mourning doves in their beautiful lidded repose. The blood of the birds and the fishes, and the seeds of the harvest. I found the skin of our resident chicken snake, shed and left on the hearth. He’s getting ready to move outside. The days are warming, and though it’s still cool in the evenings we stay out late in the backyard, sipping Harold’s Famous Grouse to stay warm, trying in our hearts to restore a little order to the world. I’m hoping to be out here at least until midnight, when Canis Major finally descends in the west, having traveled of an evening across the southern horizon. It rises up before sunset and glows bright above the pastures at dusk, big bright Sirius the first star in the sky, to wish upon for a fruitful planting. It stirs me to look up at them, all of them, not just this one, stirs me beyond my own enormous sense of personal disappointment. And Harold, in his cups, calls Otis over and strikes a pose: “Orion, the hunter,” he says, “and his Big Dog.” Otis, looking up at him, strikes the pose, too: Is there something out there? Will we hunt? Harold holds the pose, and Otis trots out into the field, restless, snuffling. I can feel the earth turning beneath us, rolling beneath the stars. Looking up, I lose my balance and fall back flat in the grass.
If the Grouse lasts we’ll stay out till dawn, when the stellar dog and hunter are off tracing the histories of other worlds, the cold distant figures of the hero Perseus and his love Andromeda fading in the morning glow into nothing.
And then we will stumble into the falling-down house and to our beds. And all our dreams will roll toward the low point in the center of the house and pool there together, mingling in the drafts under the doors with last year’s crumbling leaves and the creeping skinks and the dreams of the dogs, who must dream of the chase, the hunt, of bitches in heat, the mingling of old spoors with their own musty odors. And deep in sleep they dream of space travel, of dancing on their hind legs, of being men with the heads and muzzles of dogs, of sleeping in beds with sheets, of driving cars, of taking their fur coats of
f each night and making love face to face. Of cooking their food. And Harold and I dream of days of following the backs of men’s knees, and faint trails in the soil, the overpowering odors of all our kin, our pasts, every mistake as strong as sulfur, our victories lingering traces here and there. The house is disintegrating into dust. The end of all of this is near.
Just yesterday Harold went into the kitchen for coffee and found the chicken snake curled around the warm pot. Otis went wild. Harold whooped. The screams of Sophia the surveyor rang high and clear and regular, and in my half-sleep I could only imagine the source of this dissonance filling the air. Oh, slay me and scatter my parts in the field. The house was hell. And Ike, too, baying—out on the porch—full-lunged, without memory or sense, with only the barking of Otis to clue his continuing: already lost within his own actions, forgetting his last conscious needs.
SEEING EYE
THE DOG CAME TO THE CURB’S EDGE AND STOPPED. The man holding on to his halter stopped beside him. Across the street, the signal flashed the words “Don’t Walk.” The dog saw the signal but paid little notice. He was trained to see what mattered: the absence of moving traffic. The signal kept blinking. The cars kept driving through the intersection. He watched the cars, listened to the intensity of their engines, the arid whine of their tires. He listened for something he’d become accustomed to hearing, the buzz and tumbling of switches from the box on the pole next to them. The dog associated it with the imminent stopping of the cars. He looked back over his right shoulder at the man, who stood with his head cocked, listening to the traffic.
A woman behind them spoke up.
“Huh,” she said. “The light’s stuck.”
The dog looked at her, then turned back to watch the traffic, which continued to rush through the intersection without pause.
“I’m going down a block,” the woman said. She spoke to the man. “Would you like me to show you a detour? No telling how long this light will be.”
