Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  “Roseann has left her boy Jimbo with me this week, and I need transportation. Can I depend on you?”

  Francis nodded. “Sure. I’ll get it taken care of. I’ll send Arzell up yonder to get the car and look it over. Just leave it to me. Consider it done.”

  Bright smiled. “After all, they don’t call you Big Deal for nothing. And one other thing, Francis …”

  “Yes’m.”

  “When you talk to Mr. Doyle Butterworth again, you tell him to tell Fitz Birdsong to call his mama.”

  “Yes’m.”

  By the time she got back to the house, walking slowly in the heat, a pickup truck with BIG DEAL O’NEILL NEW AND USED CARS on the side was turning the corner in front of the Dixie Vittles, creeping up Birdsong Boulevard toward the parsonage. Arzell, the mechanic, waved to her. She wondered if he had a bag of wooden clothespins with him.

  Bright went straight to the kitchen and fixed two glasses of lemonade and two oatmeal cookies on a plate and took them to the porch, set them on the table at Jimbo’s elbow while he watched her, then sat down in the other chair with the table between them.

  “Drink up,” she said. He closed his book and took a glass of lemonade and a cookie.

  Out beyond the porch, the afternoon baked—bright spikes of sunlight riddling the pecan trees and dappling the lawn, Claxton Avenue and the River Bridge floating above themselves on a shimmer of heat. Bright got up and pulled the long cord on the paddle porch fan. It turned slowly, barely whispering, sending small warm ripples of air down toward them. Bright sat, listening, then wondering what she was listening for, then realizing it was the telephone. The house was quiet. Just the sound of the afternoon outside and the whoosh of the ceiling fan.

  “Are you enjoying your book?” she asked.

  Jimbo shrugged his small shoulders. “I suppose.”

  “You what?”

  “I suppose.”

  “What kind of language is that for a ten-year-old boy? Repeat after me: ‘I reckon.’ ”

  He stared at her. “I reckon,” he said finally.

  “Do you ever use the word ain’t?”

  “Mama won’t let me.”

  “It’s a perfectly good word for people your age. Adult people should not say ain’t. But young folks, especially boys, should flavor their speech with an occasional ain’t!”

  “Why?”

  “Because it shows you don’t go around with starch in your britches. And because it’s emphatic. When you say ‘I’m not going to,’ that’s one thing. But when you say ‘I ain’t,’ that’s emphatic. Final. Kaput.” She snapped her fingers.

  “But Mama …”

  “Your mama is a fine and upstanding woman and a good mother. She is also a bit of a stiff-neck at times.”

  “I suppose she is.” Jimbo nodded. He took a sip from his glass of lemonade and bit off a piece of one of the oatmeal cookies, chewing slowly. Bright wondered how many times Roseann had told him to chew his food.

  “Reckon,” Bright corrected.

  He put the cookie back on the plate and gazed up into her face for a moment. Then he blurted, “You know what Rupert told me before they left?”

  “What’s that?”

  “He said I ought to keep my eyes and ears open because you’re a savvy old gal and I might learn something.”

  “Hah! Rupert said that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He said it exactly that way? ‘A savvy old gal’?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Well, we’ll see.” Bright picked up her own glass of lemonade. “I haven’t had a boy around the place for a long time, so I’m not sure what I’m up to here. You’ll just have to bear with me. I have three rules: don’t mess with Gladys, don’t let the faucet drip in the kitchen, and flush the commode when you get through going to the bathroom. The rest of it is up to you.”

  “Who’s Gladys?”

  “The dog.”

  “You’ve got a dog?”

  “An ancient, decrepit dog. She lives under the house. If you sit here long enough and listen carefully enough, you will hear her banging around amongst the pipes. Her favorite place is just below my bedroom.”

  Jimbo’s eyes widened. “Josephus is under the house.”

  “Who?”

  “The alligator. I put him under the house before they left. He’s under there right now. Taking a nap.”

  “Ahhhh. Yes. Well, Gladys doesn’t eat alligators. She eats canned dog food soaked in warm milk. Does your alligator eat dogs?”

  “Of course not. But he’s not used to anybody else sleeping under the house with him.”

  Bright stifled a smile. He looked so terribly earnest, so somber about it.

  “Well,” she said after a moment, “let’s give ’em a chance.”

  Jimbo made a small frown. “I suppose so.”

  “I reckon.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “All right. I reckon. But Josephus won’t like it.”

  They sat drinking their lemonade and finishing their cookies, pondering the thought of an old dog and an alligator coexisting underneath the house.

  “Where did Gladys come from?” Jimbo asked after a while.

  “Your uncle Fitz brought her home from law school. Lord, that was twenty years ago. Maybe a tad longer.”

  “Dogs don’t live that long,” Jimbo said.

  “This one does. She’s pickled. A recovering alcoholic.”

  Jimbo gave her a long, curious look.

  “You think I’m a bit daft, don’t you,” she said. He shrugged. “Well, I suppose I am. You get that way when you live by yourself for a long time. You get set in your ways and you do odd things without thinking they’re odd. For me, it’s odd having someone else around. Nice, but odd.” And it was, she thought. Odd to have someone to talk to in this house where there was so much silence, where the faint humming of the old Kelvinator and the whoosh of the ceiling fan on the porch became imbedded in the silence that wrapped you like a cocoon, like the heat on a June afternoon. Time ticked away and you didn’t even hear it, only felt it sometimes in your bones. Not time itself, but the soft underbelly of time, the almost imperceptible eddies it left in its wake.

  She heard the banging at the back door then. Buster Putnam, standing on the steps, peering through the screen. “May I use your bathroom?” he asked.

  “What’s wrong with your bathroom?” She put a little starch in her voice, letting him know she hadn’t forgotten the morning.

  “It’s out of commission,” he said. “The plumber’s over there now.”

  So she let him in, showed him the tiny bathroom off her bedroom, went back to the front porch.

  “Who was that?” Jimbo asked.

  “General Putnam.”

  “Is he a real general?”

  “He used to be,” Bright said, “but I don’t think he’s quite sure any more.”

  They sat and finished their lemonade and cookies, watching the traffic on Birdsong Boulevard glide by in the heat, a few cars with their windows rolled up and a shirtless teenage boy on a bicycle with a white towel draped around his neck, heading home from the city swimming pool, pedaling slowly. “Do you want to go swimming?” she asked.

  Jimbo looked over at her. “Now?”

  “Tomorrow. There’s a public pool.” Then she thought of something else. “Or, there’s the river. We could go out to the camp house.”

  “You have a camp house?”

  “Oh, yes. In fact, it’s rather famous right now. Did you see the newspaper your mother had this morning?”

  “The one with the picture of Uncle Fitz and the floozy?”

  “The, ah … yes. Well, that was the camp house.”

  Jimbo thought about it for a moment. “Mama says Uncle Fitz is too big for his britches. Is that why he took ’em off?”

  She tried to think of an answer for that, but Buster Putnam rescued her, banging loudly on the bathroom door. “Bright! Dammit, Bright!”

  She went to the door. He
was shaking it violently from the inside, rattling the doorknob and growling. “What’s the matter?” she shouted above the din.

  “The damned door won’t open,” he said, exasperated. “I can’t turn the knob. It’s broken.”

  “Are you decent?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  She opened the door. He stood there, red-faced, sweating. She glowered at him, then turned the inside knob lightly with her fingers, like a thief delicately opening a safe.

  “It’s broken,” he repeated.

  “No, it’s not broken, but it would have been in a few seconds the way you were beating on it. You just have to know how to work it.”

  He thrust his jaw out. He was freshly shaven, but it was a bad job. There were flecks of blood on his chin and upper lip, patches of stubble he had missed. The bandage on his thumb was soiled. “It’s broken,” Buster said stubbornly. “It doesn’t work so that ordinary people can use it. Something inside the mechanism isn’t right. You ought to get it fixed.”

  “It works better than your commode,” Bright said evenly.

  “I’ll fix my commode if you’ll fix the doorknob on your bathroom.”

  “If you’ll fix your commode, you won’t have to worry about the doorknob on my bathroom,” she shot back. “And besides, you have a foul mouth, Buster. I’ve got a small boy out on my front porch, and you sound like you’re in a barracks or something.”

  “What small boy?”

  “Jimbo. Roseann’s son. He’s staying with me while Roseann and Rupert go to the beach. Come on and I’ll introduce you. If you’ll keep a civil tongue.”

  He followed her to the door, but the front porch was empty. They found him in the backyard, down on all fours, peering through the hole in the brickwork by the steps into the dark underneath of the house, being careful not to let the knees of his pants touch the bare ground. They both stopped and looked at him, and Jimbo rose to his feet.

  “This is Jimbo,” Bright said. “Jimbo, this is General Putnam.”

  “Don’t you like the beach?” Buster demanded.

  Jimbo looked him up and down for a moment. “I suppose not.”

  “I’m trying to get him to say reckon,” Bright said.

  Buster pointed to the hole in the brickwork. “What are you doing down there?”

  Bright could see a little flash of something across Jimbo’s face, almost a smile, and then he said, “I was looking to see if my alligator has eaten Gladys.”

  Jimbo and Buster studied each other for a moment, Buster working his jaw and Jimbo standing there with his hands at his sides, everything neat and tucked and clean. Finally, Jimbo said, “You don’t look like a general.”

  Buster glowered at Jimbo. “And you don’t look much like a boy,” he pronounced. “What you need is some overalls.” Then he turned to Bright. “Listen, about this morning …”

  “What about it?”

  “I didn’t mean to meddle.”

  “I hope not,” she said. “Neither did I.”

  Buster rubbed his face, his hand making the patches of stubble sound like sandpaper. “I saw the newspaper just now. About Fitz.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” he said with a twitch of his nose, “things aren’t so quiet over here after all, are they.”

  She fixed him with an icy stare. “We’ve all got plenty to keep us busy.”

  Buster Putnam gave her a little wink and then turned without another word and disappeared through a gap in the hedge. Bright stood staring at the hedge, Jimbo looking up at her curiously. In a moment, she heard the whine of the band saw from his toolshed.

  “What is he doing?” Jimbo asked.

  “Renovating,” Bright said. “And you stay away from over there. He’s either going to disappear through the floor or get eaten by one of those machines.”

  Jimbo looked down at himself then, at his neat khaki pants and madras shirt and nearly white tennis shoes. “Do I need overalls?”

  “About that one thing,” Bright said, “he may be right.”

  In the late afternoon, with the heat still clinging to the pavement on Birdsong Boulevard, they crossed the street again to the Dixie Vittles. They had had a long discussion about supper and settled on a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and then Bright remembered she was out of peanut butter. So they headed for the supermarket, and Bright found herself feeling strangely light and alert here in the shank of the day, when she normally would be sitting quietly on the porch with the light going soft and pale out under the pecan trees and fireflies beginning to wink above the grass and insects making night music. She should be exhausted, with all that had happened. Perhaps it was Jimbo. Or maybe waiting for Fitz, who still had not called. Or maybe it was something else altogether. But what more could there be in a day such as this?

  Jimbo held the door for her and they stepped into the noisy clatter of the Dixie Vittles, busy with the last-minute rush before closing time. Doris Hawkins looked up from her cash register, brushed back a strand of hair that flopped across her forehead, gave them a tired wave.

  Monkey Deloach was standing just inside the door, hands clasped behind him, bending slightly forward as if ready to set sail but not quite sure of the heading.

  Bright and Monkey and Xuripha had been children together years ago—Monkey wretchedly homely, with ears so big they seemed like wings. The others, Bright included, called him Monkey. And over the years he came to accept it with quiet resignation. The thing that saved Monkey was that he was also as smart as a whip, and Xuripha Hard-wicke had seen it and allowed Monkey to pursue and finally marry her. Monkey had worked for Bright’s father, Dorsey Bascombe, and finally bought the lumber business himself and made a fortune with it. But the year before, he had turned it over to his son Donald. Without the business, with only Xuripha to deal with, he seemed to lose track of himself. He spent a good bit of the day downtown, making the rounds of the business district, stopping people to talk until they could edge away and escape. Monkey had developed a strange pattern of speech, like a car left parked at the curb with its motor running.

  Just now, Monkey turned and saw Bright and Jimbo as they entered the Dixie Vittles. His face brightened. “Ah, uh, hummmmmmm … top of the … hmmmmmmm ….” he started.

  She clasped his arm. “Monkey, I want you to meet my grandson. Jimbo, this is Mr. Deloach.”

  Jimbo looked up at him. “Why do they call you Monkey?” he asked.

  Monkey’s small bright eyes twinkled. “Because I have big ears,” he said without a stammer. He stuck out his hand and Jimbo shook it.

  “Well, we came to get peanut butter,” Jimbo said.

  Monkey laughed, then looked perplexed. “I, ah, hummmmm …”

  “Monkey, may I help you?” Bright interrupted.

  He nodded. “Xuripha needs … ah … hummmmm …”

  “Do you have a list?”

  “Yep. Right here … hummmmm …” He fished in the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a neatly folded piece of paper that he handed to Bright.

  She unfolded it, looked at both sides. “No, this is from the state, telling you it’s time to renew your driver’s license.”

  “Well, that’s all … hummmmm … I’ve got,” he said, taking the paper and putting it back in his shirt pocket. “And Xuripha … hummmmm … won’t let me get my license renewed. She … hummmmm … says I’ll leave for the store and end up in … hummmmm … Bangkok.”

  Poor Monkey, she thought with a pang, growing old and wizened and confused. She owed him a debt. He had rescued her father’s business from ruin, had insisted all these years in keeping the original name. Bascombe Lumber Company. There was a loyalty there that went beyond names. And now, this. Xuripha spoke of the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Bright thought it might be more like aimlessness. Monkey Deloach should have stayed at the lumberyard. Or, he should find something else. You couldn’t just muddle along.

  “Should I call Xuripha for you?” Bright asked.

  “Nope.” />
  “Well,” Bright said, “let me suggest this. Why don’t you stand here and watch the checkout line. Somebody may come through with something that triggers your memory. If not, I imagine Xuripha will be along presently.”

  Monkey smiled. “That’s a … hummmmm … good idea.”

  They left him there, leaning slightly forward, watching the conveyor belt at Doris Hawkins’s checkout counter, shaking his head slightly as food items slid by. Bright and Jimbo selected a medium-sized jar of peanut butter—smooth, because Jimbo did not like crunchy food—and stood in line at the counter. Bright could feel the stares of the dozen or so other customers. They have all read the paper and they all know that Little Fitz Birdsong has made a damfool of himself. But they are too polite, or too embarrassed, to say anything about it. Thank God. If they were to ask, what could I say? “Sorry, I don’t know a thing about it. The governor hasn’t called his mama.” Then a black man at the front of the line called out, “Miz Bright, you come on up here and get checked out. No sense you waiting with that one jar back yonder.”

  The other customers gave them a little chorus of agreement. “Thank you, I’m much obliged,” she said, and she and Jimbo slipped past them to the front of the line, in front of the man who had called out to her and behind a woman whose large order Doris was checking through. The man looked vaguely familiar. “My daddy worked for your daddy,” he said. “I’m Luther Fox.”

  “Babe Fox’s boy,” she smiled.

  “Yes’ m.”

  She remembered his father, a squat, barrel-chested man who drove one of Dorsey Bascombe’s logging trucks.

  “Your father …”

  “Dead thirteen years,” Luther Fox said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ve lost track.”

  “Yes’m.”

  She looked down the line of people. There was nobody else here she knew. It was a small town, and she should know at least some of them. But they were all strangers. And it struck her then that she was the stranger here. She had hidden away in the house across the street, and in the past, and this town had left her to her privacy. Mostly, that was her doing. But theirs too, perhaps, because she was the congressman’s widow and a bit beyond their everydayness, the only thing they had that resembled a celebrity. And she had drifted away from them in the quiet stillness of her life, dwelling as she did upon memory. She walked the streets of this town and did business with its people without taking notice of them, and they had let her do that, as they would leave her to deal privately with the present business of her son the governor.