Last Days of the Dog-Men

by Brad Watson

  “If you’re looking for a hammer, it’s in the bottom drawer on the left,” Sam said, “but I think she’s locked herself in there.” Merle glared at him briefly, then went for the drawer.

  “The least you could do is help us get her out,” she muttered.

  “I’m telling you, Merle, just leave it alone,” Sam said. “She’ll come out of the box when she’s good and goddamn ready and you better just leave it the hell alone.”

  Merle straightened up from the drawer and stamped her feet in a paroxysm of fury, sputtering a mangled mouthful of curses, her face screwed up and her fists flailing about the kitchen air.

  “Ahhhhh!” she shouted. “Don’t you tell me what to do!”

  She reached into the drawer, pulled out the hammer, and reeled past him on her way back to the den. Sam got his flashlight out of the open drawer and stepped outside.

  The starlight fell softly on the mound of dirt beside the perfect grave he’d dug that afternoon. He stood for a moment, breathing the clear night air in the breeze from the south. Then he walked around the house and looked into the living-room window. Dick pried at the box’s lid with the hammer claw while Merle stood by, her hands on her hips.

  “Hurry it up, Dick,” she said.

  Sam left the window and walked around back. He shone the flashlight onto the crawl-space hole, then shut it off. Crawling through the hole, he turned the light on again and swept it toward the spot beneath the den. He saw the hindquarters. The stench was bad. He crawled, circling around to the right, the light slashing back and forth in the dark on the bricks and boards and earth. He came around in front of the dog, set himself, and shined the light on her face.

  Her eyes bore fiercely into the beam, black lips curled back from her teeth. Sam’s heart leapt and raced in his chest.

  She never moved.

  “Oh,” he whispered, eyes welling, “poor thing.” He shut off the light and lay in the dark beside her. Above him, the shuffling sounds of the living were creaky and vague.

  KINDRED SPIRITS

  ON THE LONG GREEN LAWN THAT LED DOWN TO THE lake, Bailey’s boy tumbled with their two chocolate Labs, Buddy and Junior. The seven of us sat on Bailey’s veranda sipping bourbon and watching the boy and his dogs, watching partly because of what Bailey had just told us about the younger dog, Buddy’s progeny, a fat brute and a bully. Bailey had chosen Buddy’s mate carefully, but the union had produced a pure idiot. A little genetic imbalance, Bailey said, hard to avoid with these popular breeds.

  Watching Junior you could see that this dog was aggressively stupid. A reckless, lumbering beast with no light in his eyes, floundering onto old Buddy’s back, slamming into the boy and knocking him down. The boy is about ten or eleven and named Ulysses though they call him Lee (sort of a joke), thin as a tenpenny nail, with spectacles like his mama. He was eating it up, rolling in the grass and laughing like a lord-god woodpecker, Junior rooting at him like a hog.

  “I hate that dog,” Bailey said. “But Lee won’t let me get rid of him.”

  The slow motions of cumulus splayed light across the lawn and lake in soft golden spars, the effect upon me narcotic. My weight pressed into the Adirondack chair as if I were paralyzed from the chest down. Bailey planned this place to be like an old-fashioned lake house, long and low with a railed porch all around. Jack McAdams, with us this day, landscaped the slope to the water, then laid St. Augustine around the dogwoods, redbuds, and a thick American beech, its smooth trunk marked with tumorous carvings. Three sycamores and a sweet gum line the shore down toward the woods. The water’s surface was only slightly disturbed, like the old glass panes Bailey bought and put in his windows.

  Russell took our glasses and served us frosty mint juleps from a silver tray. Silent Russell. The color and texture of Cameroon tobacco leaf, wearing his black slacks and white serving jacket. I am curious about him to the point of self-consciousness. I try not to stare, but want to gaze upon his face through a onesided mirror. I see things in it that may or may not be there and I’m convinced of one thing, this role of the servant is merely that: Russell walks among us as the ghost of a lost civilization.

  Bailey says Russell’s family has been with his since the latter’s post-Civil War Brazilian exile, when Bailey’s great-great-grandfather fled to hack a new plantation out of the rain forest. Ten years later he returned with a new fortune and workforce, a band of wild Amazonians that jealous neighbors said he treated like kings. Only Russell’s small clan lingers.

  I looked at Russell and nodded to him.

  “Russell,” I said.

  He looked at me a long moment and nodded his old gray head.

  “Yah,” he said, followed in his way with the barely audible “sah.” After he’d handed drinks out all around, he went back inside the house.

  “Russell makes the best goddamn mint julep in the world,” said Bailey, his low voice grumbly in the quiet afternoon, late summer, the first thin traces of fall in the air.

  I could see two other men of Russell’s exact coloring working at the barbecue pit down in the grove that led to the boathouse. Russell’s boys. They’d had coals under the meat all night, Bailey said, and now we could see them stripping the seared, smoked pork into galvanized tubs. Beyond them, visible as occasional blurred slashing shadows between the trunks and limbs and leaves of small-growth hardwoods, were Bailey’s penned and compromised wild pigs, deballed and meat sweetening in the lakeside air. He looked to be building up a winter meatstock, product of several hunting trips to the north Florida swamps with Skeet Bagwell and Titus Smith, who were seated next to me on Bailey’s side. It seemed an unusual sport, to catch and castrate violent swine and pen them until their meat mellowed with enforced domesticity, and then to slit their throats. Russell’s boys partially covered the rectangular cooking pit with sheets of roofing tin and carried the tubs of meat around back of the house to the kitchen. Along the veranda we drank our mint juleps—McAdams, Bill Burton, Hoyt Williams, Titus, Skeet, Bailey, and me—arranged in a brief curving line in Bailey’s brand-new Adirondack chairs. Russell came out with more mint juleps, nodded, and slipped away.

  “HERE’S TO LOVE,” BAILEY SAID, RAISING HIS SILVER CUP. He smiled as if about to hurt someone. Probably himself. A malignant smile. Here we go, I said to myself, I don’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear his story any more than I wanted to take his case. He’d called the day before and invited me to the barbecue with these men, his best friends, and said he wanted me to represent him “in this business with Maryella.” Bailey, I’d said, I’ve never handled divorces and I don’t intend to change—as criminal as some of those cases may be. I suggested he call Larry Weeks, who’s done very well with big divorce cases in this town. No, Bailey said, you come on out, come on. We’ll talk about it. I supposed at the time it was because we’ve known each other since the first grade, though in the way of those who live parallel lives without ever really touching.

  So here we were. There were no women around, apparently, none of these men’s wives. I began to feel a familiar pain in my heart, as if it were filling with fluid, and it seemed I had to think about breathing in order to breathe. Even what little I knew about Bailey’s problem at the time forced me into places I didn’t want to go. So his wife has left him for his partner, I thought—so what? What else is new in the world? We all know something of that pain, to one degree or another.

  Ten years ago I defended a man accused of pushing his brother off a famous outcropping in the Smoky Mountains in order to get his brother’s inheritance, set for some reason at a percentage much greater than his own. It was an odd case. There’d been several other people at the lookout, where in those days a single rail kept visitors from succumbing to vertigo and tumbling down the craggy face of the cliff. My client’s hand had rested in the small of his brother’s back as they leaned over the railing to look down when the brother—like a fledgling tumbling from the nest, one witness said— pitched over the edge and disappeared.

 
It was considered an accident until my client’s cousin, who had never liked or trusted him, who in fact claimed he had once dangled her by her wrists from the treehouse behind their grandmother’s home until she agreed to give him her share of their cache of Bazooka bubble gum, hired a private investigator who was able to plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of enough witnesses to bring the case before a grand jury in Knoxville. Incredibly, the guy was indicted for murder one. I thought it so outrageous that when he called I immediately took over his case, even though it meant spending time traveling back and forth across the state line.

  I liked the man. While he and I prepared for trial, my wife, Dorothy, and I had him out to dinner a few times and twice even took him to my family’s old shanty on the Gulf Coast for the weekend. He and Dorothy hit it off well. Each was a lover of classical music (Doro had studied piano at the university until she gave up her hope of composing and switched to music history), and he was a tolerable pianist. They discussed the usual figures, Schubert and Brahms and Mozart, etc., as well as names I’d never heard of. They sat at the piano to study a particular phrase. They retired to the den to play old LPs Doro had brought to our marriage but which had gathered dust during the years I’d built my practice, never having had the energy to listen with her after dragging in at near midnight with a satchel full of work for the next morning. I often awoke at one or two in the morning, tie twisted and cinched against my throat, the dregs of a scotch and water in the glass in my lap, while the stereo needle scratched at the label of a recording long done easing strains of Sibelius from its grooves. In the bedroom I’d find Doro turned into the covers, her arms tossed over a pillow that covered her head, as was her sleeping habit, as if she were trying to smother herself.

  I can look back now and see things. I pursued her when she didn’t necessarily want to be pursued. The law school was just two blocks from the music school, and I would wander down the boulevard and into the resonant halls of the studios and to the room where she practiced and composed. I would stand outside the door, looking in through the narrow window no wider than half of my face, until she looked up, would have to look up, with her dark eyes as open upon mine as an animal’s in the woods when it discovers you standing still and watching it, and it is watching your eyes to see if you are something alive. I did not do this every day, but only when my blood was up too high to sit at the law library desk and, thinking of the last time we had been together, I had to see her. One day when she looked up, I knew that she had not wanted to but for some reason had been unable not to, and when she did look up she knew that was it, she was mine. It was the moment when one is captured by love in spite of one’s misgivings and is lost.

  But light bends to greater forces, and so does fate, in time. I should not have been so stricken when she left with my client after the trial, but of course I was. An overweight man who eats bacon, drinks heavily, smokes, and never exercises should expect a heart attack, too, and does, but is nevertheless surprised when it comes and he is certainly stricken. I’d given my all to the case, I’d fought for the man. Work had become my life, after all. I’d exposed the cousin as a bankrupt, scheming bitch, read letters between the brothers that were full of fraternal endearments, and I borrowed and brought into court an expensive, full-size oil copy of Durand’s famous painting, Kindred Spirits, depicting the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Bryant standing on an outcropping in the Catskills, a spot less lofty than the scene of my client’s alleged crime, but more beautiful in its romantic, cloistering light, and I asked them how a brother, in a setting such as this, and with witnesses less than ten feet away, could do something so unnatural as pitch his own flesh and blood to a bloody end. It was a stroke of brilliance. No one sees that painting without being moved to sentimental associations. Rosenbaum, the D.A., was furious I got away with it. My client also had a noble face: a straight nose, strong brow, high forehead, strong jaw and chin, clear brown eyes that declared a forthright nature. But in the end, after the hung jury and the judge’s bitter words, my client and my wife moved to Tennessee, of all places, where he would set himself up in the insurance business. And here is my point, I suppose, or what makes the story worth telling.

  When she began to call me three years later, in secret, explaining how he had become a cold and manipulative man, she told me he had admitted to her while drunk that he had indeed pushed his brother off the lookout, and he’d said that only I had any evidence of this, in a statement I’d taken wherein he slipped up and said the one thing that could have convicted him had the D.A. gotten his hands on it. I could hear the ghosted voices of other, garbled conversations drifting into our line. What one thing is that? I said. I don’t know, she said. He wouldn’t tell me. There was a pause on the line, and then she said, You could find it, Paul.

  But I have never opened the file to search for the incriminating words. Moreover, although I have acquired an almost tape-recorder memory of the utterances of people in trouble, I have not bothered to prod that little pocket in my brain. I have detoured around it as easily as I swerve around a sawhorsed manhole in the street. I protected my client, as any good attorney would. I’ve moved on.

  WE WALKED DOWN INTO THE GROVE, PAST THE THIN smoking curtain of heat at the edge of the pit, its buckled tin, and up to the heavy-gauge wire fencing that surrounded about a half acre of wooded area bordering the cove. Here there was no grass, and the moist leaves were matted on the rich, grub- and worm-turned earth. Through the rectangular grid of the fencing we saw small pockets of ground broken up as if by the steel blades of a tiller where the pigs had rooted, and slashes and gouges in tree trunks where they’d sharpened their tusks.

  I looked over at Bailey swirling the crushed ice in his cup, the righteous tendons in his jaw hardening into lumpy bands of iron. He was seething with his own maudlin story. But before he could start up, we heard a rustling followed by a low grunt, and a wild hog shot out of the undergrowth and charged. We all jumped back but Bailey as the hog skidded to a stop just short of the wire, strangely dainty feet on scraggly legs absurdly spindly beneath its massive head. Its broad shoulders tapered along its mohawkish spinal ridge to the hips of a running back and to its silly poodlish tail. The pig stood there, head lowered, small-eyed, snorting every few breaths or so, watching Bailey from beneath its thick brow. Bailey looked back at the beast, impassive, as if its appearance had eased his mind for a moment. And the boar grew even more still, staring at Bailey.

  The spell was broken by the loud clanging of a bell. Russell, clanging the authentic antique triangle for our meal. The pig walked away from us then, indifferent, stiff-legged, as if mounted on little hairy stilts.

  WE MADE OUR WAY BACK TO THE PORCH. RUSSELL AND one of the men who’d been tending the pit came out with a broad tray of meat already sauced, and a woman (no doubt one of Russell’s daughters or granddaughters) came out and set down on the table a stack of heavy plates, a pile of white bread, an iron pot full of baked beans, and we all got up to serve ourselves. When we sat back down, Bill Burton, who’d dug into his food before anybody else, made a noise like someone singing falsetto and looked up, astonished.

  “By God, that’s good barbecue,” he said through a mouthful of meat. Burton was a plumbing contractor who’d done the plumbing for Bailey’s house. He said to Skeet Bagwell, “Say you shot this pig?”

  “Well,” Skeet said, “let me tell you about that pig.” Like me, Skeet is a lawyer, but we aren’t much alike. He rarely takes a criminal case, but goes for the money, and loves party politics and the country club and hunting trips and all that basically extended fraternity business, never makes a phone call his secretary can make for him, and needless to say he loves to tell big lies. His compadre Titus built shopping malls during the 1980s and doesn’t do much of anything now.

  “Titus and I captured that pig,” Skeet said, “down in the Florida swamps. Ain’t that right, Titus?”

  “I wouldn’t say, not exactly captured,” Titus said. “In a way, or briefl
y, perhaps, we captured that pig, but then we killed it. It may be a mite gamy.”

  “Uhn-uh,” voices managed. “Not a bit!”

  Skeet said, “You ain’t had your blood stirred till you crossing a clearing in the swamp and hear a bunch of pigs rooting and grunting, you don’t know where they are, and then you see their shapes, just these big, low, broad, hulking shadows, inside the bushes on the other side, and then they smell you and disappear, just disappear. It’s eerie.” Skeet took a mouthful of the barbecue, sopped up some sauce with a piece of bread, and chewed. We waited on him to swallow, sitting there on the veranda. Down on the lawn the boy, (Ulysses) Lee, ran screaming from the bounding dogs.

  Skeet said it was exciting to see the pigs slip out of the woods and light out across a clearing, and the dogs’ absolute joy in headlong pursuit. They were hunting these pigs with the local method, he said. You didn’t shoot them. You used your dogs to capture them.

  “We had this dog, part Catahoula Cur—you ever heard of them?”

  “State dog of Louisiana,” Hoyt said.

  “Looks kind of prehistoric,” Skeet said. “They breed them over in the Catahoula Swamp in Louisiana. Well, this dog was a cross between a Catahoula Cur and a pit bull, and that’s the best pig dog they is. Like a compact Doberman. They can run like a deer dog and they’re tough and strong as a pit bull. And they got that streak of meanness they need, because a boar is just mean as hell.” Skeet said he’d seen an African boar fight a whole pack of lions on TV one night, did we see that? Lions tore the boar to bits, but he fought the whole time. “I mean you couldn’t hardly see the boar for all the lion asses stuck up in the air over him, tails swishing, ripping him up, twenty lions or more,” Skeet said. They had pieces of him scattered around the savanna in seconds, but there was his old head, tusking blindly even as one of the lions licked at his heart. Skeet took another bite of barbecue and chewed, looking off down the grassy slope at the tussling boy and dogs.