by Brad Watson
“This dog Titus and I had, we bought him off a fellow down there said he was the best dog he’d ever seen for catching a hog, and he was right.” Titus nodded in agreement. “We got out in the swamp with him, and bim, he was off on a trail, and ran us all over that swamp for about an hour, and never quit until he run down that hog.
“We come up on him out in this little clearing, and he’s got this big old hog by the snout, holding his head down on the ground, hog snorting and grunting and his eyes leaking bile. I mean, that dog had him. But then we come to find out how we got this wonder dog at such a bargain.”
“I had a preacher sell me a blind dog one time,” Hoyt said. “Said how hot he was for a rabbit, and cheap. Sumbitch when I let loose the leash took off flying after a rabbit and run right into an oak tree, knocked hisself cold.”
Everybody laughed at that.
“Preacher said, ‘I never said he wasn’t blind,’ ” Hoyt said.
“Well, this dog wasn’t blind,” Skeet said, “not literally, but you might could say he had a blind spot. He would run the hog down, like he’s supposed to do, then take it by the snout and hold its old head down, so you can go up and hog-tie him and take him in. Way they do down there, like Bailey’s doing here, they castrate them and pen them up, let the meat sweeten awhile before they kill ’em.
“But this dog, once you grabbed the hog by the hind legs and begun to tie him, thought his job was done, and he lets go.”
Skeet paused here, looking around at us. “So there was old Titus, gentlemen, playing wheelbarrow with a wild pig that’s trying to twist around and rip his nuts off with one of them tusks. I mean that son of a bitch is mean, eyes all bloodshot, foaming at the mouth. That meat ain’t too tough, is it?”
Everyone mumbled in the negative.
“Ain’t gamy, is it?”
Naw, uhn-uh.
“So finally Titus jumped around close to a tree, lets go of the hog and hops up into it, and I’m already behind one and peeping out, and the hog jabbed his tuskers at the tree Titus was in for a minute and then shot out through the woods again, and the dog—he’d been jumping around and barking and growling and nipping at the hog—took out after him again. So Titus climbed down and we ran after them.”
“Dog was good at catching the hog,” Titus said.
“That’s right,” Skeet said. “Just didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation, once he’d done it. Actually, the way I see it, the dog figured that once the man touched the hog, then he had taken possession of the hog, see, and his job—the dog’s was over.
“Anyway, you can imagine, Titus wasn’t going near that hog held by that dog again, so one of these fellows we’re with tries it, and the same thing happens, two more times: As soon as the man touched the hog, the dog let go. And it was starting to get dark. But this fellow, name was Beauregard or something—”
“Beaucarte,” Titus said.
“—he comes up with a plan. And the next time the dog has the hog down, he manages with some kind of knot to hog-tie the hog without actually touching the hog, and the dog’s watching his every move, you know, and looking into his eyes every now and then, thinking, Why the hell ain’t he taking hold of this hog, but he holds on just fine till it’s done. But then when the guy starts to drag the hog over to this pole we go’n carry him out on, the dog—since the man hasn’t actually touched the hog at all with his hands, now—he’s still hanging on, and pulling backwards and growling like a pup holding on to a sock. Damn hog is squawling in pain and starting to buck.”
Skeet stopped here a minute to chow down on his barbecue before it got cold, and we waited on him. Bailey seemed distant, looking out over the lake, sitting still, not eating any barbecue himself.
“So the guy stops and looks back at that dog, and you could see him thinking about it. Just standing there looking at that dog. And we were tired, boy, I mean we’d been running through that damn swamp all day, and we was give out. And I could see the guy thinking about it, thinking all he had to do was reach down and touch that hog one time, and the dog would let go. And you could see the dog looking at him, still chomped down on the hog’s nose, looking up at the guy as if to say, Well, you go’n touch the hog or ain’t you? And that’s when the guy pulls his .44 Redhawk out, cocks it, and blows the son of a bitch away.”
“The hog?” says Jack McAdams, sounding hopeful. Skeet shakes his head.
“The dog,” he says.
“Your dog?” Hoyt says.
“That’s right,” Skeet said. “All in all, I guess he was doing me a favor.”
Everybody stopped eating, looking at Skeet, who finished up the little bit of barbecue on his plate and sopped up the sauce and grease with a piece of white bread. He rattled the ice chips and water in the bottom of his cup and drained the sugar-whiskey water, and I saw Russell note this and slip back into the house for more drinks.
“I guess he let go then,” Bailey said quietly, sunk deeply into his Adirondack. “The dog.”
“No,” Skeet said, “he didn’t.
“He was a mess, head all blown away, but his jaws still clamped on that nose in a death grip. He was rigor-mortised onto that hog. You can imagine the state of mind of the hog right then, that .44 laid down the ridge of his nose and going boom, shooting blue flame, and that dog’s head opening up, blood and brains and bone all over him, dog teeth clamping down even more on his nose. Hog went crazy. He jumped up and thrashed his head around, screaming in pain, shook the ropes almost free, and started hobbling and belly-crawling around this little clearing we were in. And he was dragging the dog around, flopping it around, and it wadn’t anything now but a set of teeth attached to a carcass, just a body and jaws.
“Meanwhile old Beaucarte’s feet had gotten tangled in the ropes and so there they all were, thrashing around in the near-dark, stinking swamp with a wild hog, a dead dog, and this damn cracker trying to aim his hand-cannon at the hog just to make it all stop, and finally he shot it, the hog. By then it was almost dark, and everything was still as the eye of hurricane, and the air smelled of gunpowder smoke and blood and something strange like sulfur, with the swamp rot and the gore and the sinking feeling we all had with a hunt gone wrong, and a good dog with just one flaw now dead, and everybody felt bad about it, especially this long, skinny Beaucarte.
“We dragged the hog and the dog back to the truck in the dark, tossed them in back and drove on back to the camphouse, and told these two swamp idiots on the porch, a couple of beady-eyed brothers, to take care of the hog, and then we drank some whiskey and went to bed. The next day, when we were leaving, one of the swamp idiots, name was Benny, had this old cheap pipe stuck in the comer of his mouth, brings out a big ice chest full of meat wrapped in butcher paper. And he says, ‘We goin’ on into town, now. Me and Fredrick put yo meat in this icebox, and Daddy’n them took some of the meat from the big’un.’ ”
Here Skeet stopped talking and let silence hang there a moment, and sipped from a fresh drink Russell had set down on the arm of his Adirondack. Hoyt gestured to his plate.
“So you saying this might be hog, might be dog.”
“Tastes mighty sweet to be dog,” Bill Burton said.
“Some of it’s sweeter than the rest,” Skeet allowed.
Everybody had a laugh over that, sitting there picking their teeth with minty toothpick wedges Russell had passed around from a little silver box. He freshened the drinks. The afternoon seemed to slide pleasantly, almost imperceptibly, along the equinoctial groove toward autumn.
“I TELL YOU SOMETHING,” BAILEY SAID THEN. “I GOT A story to tell, too. Skeet’s story brings me to mind of it.”
The immediate shift in mood was as palpable as if someone had walked up and slapped each one of us in the mouth. We sat in our Adirondacks, sunken, silent, and trying to focus on the boy on the lake bank tossing the ball to his dogs swimming the shallows. Holding our breaths this wouldn’t be the old epic of Bailey’s yawping grief.
“You know
this fellow, my erstwhile friend and partner, Reid Covert.”
“Bailey, ain’t you got any dessert to go with this fine barbecue?” Skeet said.
Bailey held his hand up. “No, now, hear me out,” he said, his eyes fixed somewhere out over the lake. He made a visible effort to relax. “It’s a good story, it’s all in fun.”
All right, someone mumbled, let him tell it.
“But that’s not saying it ain’t true,” Bailey said, and turns to us with such a devilish grin that we’re all a little won over by it. It was a storyteller’s smile. A liar’s smile.
All right, everybody said, easing up, go ahead on.
“Y’all didn’t know a thing about this,” he said, “but I whipped that sorry sapsucker’s ass three times before I finally got rid of him.”
Three times! we said.
“Kicked his ass.”
No! we said. We had fresh mint juleps in our hands. Russell stood to one side in his white serving jacket, looking out over the lake. Out in the yard, the boy Lee chased the chocolate Labs Buddy and Junior down to the water. He had a blue rubber-looking ball in his hand and he stopped at the bank, holding the ball up, and the dogs leaped into the air around him. Junior knocked the boy all over the place, trying to get his chops on the ball. He knocked off the boy’s glasses and then grabbed the ball when the boy got down on his knees to retrieve them.
“The first time I heard about it I went into his office and confronted him,” Bailey said. “He denied it. But, hell, I knew he was lying. It was after five. The nurses had gone, receptionist gone, insurance clerk gone. No patients. I told him, ‘You’re lying, Reid.’ He just sat there then, looking stupid, and I knew I was right. I went over and slapped him. My own partner. Friend since elementary school. Went through med school together. Slapped shit out of him. ‘How long has it been going on?’ I said. He just sat there. I told him to get up but he wouldn’t. So I slapped him again. He still just sat there. I tried to pick him up out of his chair by his shirt but he held onto the goddamn armrests, so I slapped him again. ‘Stop it, Bailey,’ he says then. ‘Stop it, hell,’ I said. I said, ‘Get up, you son of a bitch.’ And he says, ‘Stop it, Bailey.’ And so I said, ‘You son of a bitch, I want you out of this office, you and I are through.’ And I walked out.”
We were all quiet again then. It was as bad as we’d thought it would be. Bailey hadn’t worked in weeks. All his patients had to go to Birmingham. Reid Covert had taken off somewhere, and Bailey’s wife, Maryella, had gone off, too. Everybody figured they were together. And I was thinking, I guess he’ll ask me to help him divide his and Reid’s business, too.
“Well,” Bailey went on then, “Maryella wouldn’t talk to me about it, and I kept hearing they were still seeing each other. So I drove over to his house one day and pulled up as he was trying to leave. I cut off his car with mine, got out, went over, and pulled him out of his goddamn Jeep Cherokee. He didn’t even get the thing into Park, it rolled over and ran into a pine tree. And I mean I pummeled him, right there in his own goddamn front yard. Berry, she came out into the yard yelling at me, went back in to call the police, and old Reid, I’m beating the shit out of him, his nose is bloody, and he’s holding out his arm toward Berry and saying, No, don’t call the police. I let go of him and watched him limp after her, then I got back into my car and came out here. When I got here Maryella passed me in the driveway, zooming out onto the road, dust flying. Hell, Berry must’ve called her instead of the cops. Hell, she left Lee out in the goddamn yard with the dogs and went to her mother’s house, didn’t come home for two days, and when she did I had her suitcase packed and told her to get the hell out.”
All this—all the detail, anyway—was new, we had not heard it from the various sources. The boy, Lee, was throwing the blue ball into the water now and the dogs were swimming out to get it, then swimming back in, whereupon the one without it, usually the boorish Junior, would chase the one who had it, his daddy Buddy, and get it away from him. Whereupon the boy would chase down Junior, get the ball, and throw it back out into the lake.
“Look at that,” Bailey said. “I tell you it was Reid’s bitch Lab we mated Buddy with to get that sorry Junior? I should’ve drowned the goddamn dog.”
A couple of us, Hoyt and me, got up for barbecue seconds. Dog or hog, it was good, and Bailey’s story was eating at my stomach in a bad way. I needed something more in it.
“Y’all eat up,” Bailey said. “What’s left belongs to the niggers.” Old Russell, standing off to one side of the barbecue table, sort of shifted his weight and blinked, still looking out over the lake. Bailey saw this and pulled his lips tight over his teeth. “Sorry, Russell,” he mumbled. Russell, his eyes fixed on the lake’s far shore, appeared unfazed. Bailey got up, went inside, and came back out with the bottle of Knob Creek. He poured some into his mint julep cup and drank it.
“Well, finally, I followed him one day, and I watched him meet her in the parking lot of the Yacht Club, and I followed them way out here, down to the Deer Lick landing. I’d cut my lights, and I parked up the road, and then I walked down. I had my .38 pistol with me, but I wasn’t going to kill them. I had me some blanks, and I’d screwed a little sealing wax into that little depression at the end of the blanks. You ever noticed that, that little depression? When I got down there they weren’t in the car. I looked around and saw a couple standing down on the beach, just shadows in that darkness, so I walked down there. They looked around when I walked up to them, and when they realized it was me it scared them pretty bad, me showing up. I stepped up to him and said, ‘I told you to give it up, Reid,’ and that’s when he hit me, almost knocked me down. I guess he wanted to get the first lick in, for once. I went back at him, and it was a real street fight, pulling hair and wrestling and kicking and throwing a punch every now and then, and hell Maryella might have been in on it for all I know. I finally threw him down onto the sand, and his shirt ripped off in my hands. Maryella was standing with her feet in the water, with her hands over her face, and I was standing there over Reid, out of breath and worn out. And he looked up then and said, ‘You’re going to have to kill me to get rid of me, Bailey. I love her.’ So I pulled out the pistol from my pocket and said, ‘All right.’ And I shot him. All five rounds.”
We were all quiet as ghosts. The squeals from the boy and the playful growling of the dog Junior, and the good-natured barking of Buddy his daddy, all wafted up from the lake. The ball arced out over the water, and the dogs leapt after it with big splashes.
“Well, he hollered like he was dying,” Bailey said. “I imagine it hurt, wax or not, and scared the holy shit out of him. It was loud as hell. I saw these dark blotches blossom on his skin. You know Reid always was a pale motherfucker. When he saw the blood, his head fell back onto the beach sand.
“Maryella said, ‘You killed him.’ By God, I thought I had, too. I thought, Jesus Christ, I am so addled I forgot to use the blanks, I have shot the son of a bitch with real bullets. I jumped down there and took a look, and in a minute I could see that I hadn’t done that. The pieces of wax had pierced the skin, though, and he was bleeding from these superficial wounds. He’d fainted.
“And Maryella panicked then. She started to run away. I tackled her and dragged her back to Reid to show her he was all right, but she wouldn’t quit slapping at me and screaming, ‘You killed him, you killed him!’ over and over again. She said she loved him, and she’d never loved me. I shoved her head under the shallow water there at the beach, but when I pulled her up again she just took a deep breath and started screaming the same thing again, ‘You killed him, I hate you!’ And that’s when Reid jumped onto my back, and shoved me forward. I still had a hold on Maryella’s neck, see, and my arms were held out stiff, like this,” and he held his arms out, his hands at the end of them held in a horseshoe shape, the way they would be if they were around a neck. Bailey looked at his hands held out there, like that.
“I felt her neck crack beneath my hands,” he said
. “Beneath our weight, mine and Reid’s.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. I heard his boy, Lee, calling him from down at the lake. No one answered him or looked up. We were all staring at Bailey, who wasn’t looking at anything in particular. He looked tired, almost bored.
“Anyway,” he said then, “I couldn’t let Reid get away with causing that to happen. I found the gun and hit him over the head with it. And then I held him under until he drowned.”
Bailey swirled what was left in his mint julep cup, looking down into the dregs. He turned it up and sucked at the bits of ice and mint and the soggy sugar in the bottom. Then he sat back in his chair, poured more bourbon into the cup, and said in a voice that was chilling to me, because I recognized the method of manipulation behind it, taking the shocked imagination and diverting it to the absurd: “So when I brought them back here, that’s when Russell’s boys skinned ’em up and put ’em over the coals.”
There was silence for a long moment, and then McAdams, Bill Burton, Hoyt, Titus, and Skeet broke into a kind of forced, polite laughter.
“Shit, Bailey,” McAdams said. “You just about tell it too good for me.”
“So gimme some more of that human barbecue, Russell,” Titus said.
“ ‘Long pig’ is the Polynesian term, I believe,” Skeet said.
Their laughter came more easily now.
The boy, Lee, came running up to the porch steps.
“Daddy,” he said. He was crying, his voice high and quailing. Bailey turned his darkened face to the boy as if to an executioner.
“Daddy, Junior’s trying to hurt old Buddy.”
We looked up. Out in the lake, Buddy swam with the ball in his mouth. Junior was trying to climb up onto Buddy’s back. Both dogs looked tired, their heads barely clearing the surface. Junior mounted Buddy from behind, and as he climbed Buddy’s back the older dog, his nose held straight up and the ball still in his teeth, went under.
