“Here,” Randall said, holding the twisting dog by the belt with one hand, the other pulling a pillowcase from yet another pocket.
“No,” Cattie said, shocked. She wasn’t going to be party to a puppy execution, some rocks-in-the-bag river drowning. Was that what he’d meant, about his father’s lack of manliness? That he wouldn’t kill the babies, but merely abandon them to suffering starvation, go like a coward only halfway?
“I couldn’t find a thing in that house,” he said, reminding her of their futile search at Joanne’s. “It’s the only way I could think to bundle them together. You need two hands to carry them, or they’ll get squashed. I’ll do it, if you think you can—” The mother made a sudden feverish whirl at the end of the nooselike belt, shaking her head as if to break her own neck; she might have had the same fear Cattie had, that Randall meant her babies harm. Randall pulled up on the improvised lead, meanwhile using his foot to step on her hind feet. It was a training trick Cattie had seen her mother use, once upon a time.
“I’ll carry them,” Cattie said, taking the pillowcase and gently lifting the puppies, one by one. They were limp and warm, still sticky and with a faint bloody odor of being newly born, their eyes squinted, their faces indefinite, ugly. They started a fresh round of mewling when they found themselves together in a bag, and their mother struggled hard against Randall’s tight hold on her. Dogs only understood a little of what you said to them; a sad fact, Cattie had always thought, incomplete knowledge. You might prefer utter ignorance. She clasped the squirming mess to her chest, terrified; what if she were responsible for one’s death? For more than one’s?
“We’re gonna have to leave that other little guy, number eight, sacrificial lamb of the litter. Dumbass,” he directed at the mother, although not unkindly. She was panting now over the choking tightness of the belt cinched around her throat. “Come on,” he said, and they started out the way they’d come in, Cattie concentrating so hard on not squeezing or slipping or inadvertently asphyxiating anybody that she broke into a hot sweat.
Back at Joanne’s house, returned once more to the kitchen, Cattie set the pillowcase carefully on the rug before the oven, repeating the mantra she’d been whispering to herself for the last hour: Please let them all be alive. She peeled open the sack, and there they were, smaller and blacker than they’d seemed in the woods, curled like tiny boxing gloves. Randall shut the room’s doors to the porch, bathroom, and hall, and then loosened the belt from the mother’s neck. She snarled at him, shook from head to tail, then barked once at Cattie as if to make sure Cattie understood she wasn’t pardoned from being an accomplice. Cattie said, “Hey now,” having ascertained that her work had been a success: seven beating hearts in those slack black pouches, those future independent beings. The bright kitchen, the warm air, the rag rug onto which they’d been set, had stunned them briefly, but soon enough the mewling started up once again. The mother then appeared to forget Randall and Cattie, and began a furious session of cleaning, her tongue so fierce as to knock her puppies over as they clamored at her feet. Randall lit a burner on the stovetop and then joined Cattie at the table. The room grew warm while they watched; outside, an early evening was falling. It would snow again, Cattie thought; the clouds were low and heavy. Eventually, when every puppy had been thoroughly tongued and mightily upset, the mother settled just off the rug, onto the linoleum as if to decline comfort, her back against the cupboard as if to prevent a surprise attack from behind, and her desperate babies finally plugged themselves in.
Cattie let out a breath. What an extraordinary length of time it seemed she’d been holding it. Then, to her complete mortification, she began to cry. It came like a storm, like an act of God, like a bomb. It was sobbing that would last for hours, uncontrollable, so much crying that her eyes would dry up and she’d have to wet them with her fingertips, licking them, then soothing her eyes. And still she would continue to cry, on and on. It was torrential, epic, explosive, and no less alarming to her than it was to poor Randall.
What the fuck?! his horrified thought balloon read. Cattie was thinking the same thing.
His capacity for human interaction had been seriously overtaxed by the simple request he’d made of her earlier. His conversation with her in the woods was the lengthiest he’d had in months. Her crying felt chaotic to him, as if it presaged other emotional havoc, episodes he had been avoiding and preempting with one hundred percent of his attention and time. At boot camp, he’d watched a fellow soldier drink himself to death on his twenty-first birthday. They’d passed out together, companionably enough, in the highest of spirits, and then his friend had not awoken the next morning. That was the last extreme feeling he’d allowed himself, that evening’s high hilarity; it was a deadly indulgence, extreme feeling. To its credit, the army had seen that Randall required help. He was in the process of getting it when he discovered the gap between being dropped off for therapy and being picked up fifty-five minutes later. Into that gap he had fled. And here he had landed, a thousand miles north, hidden in an attic, not having any effect on any person, nothing he could be accused of or responsible for, the stakes of his existence blessedly bland. AWOL, and glad of it.
Attachments were dangerous; hadn’t he just proved the point? Finding the dog had started the trouble. Not rescuing it meant living with what would become overwhelming guilt; rescuing it meant caring if its puppies died, risking his living situation with Joanne, who seemed like someone who might not have much use for pets. And now the girl was sobbing uncontrollably across the table from him, a girl who had appeared to be as interested in solitude and isolation and restrained interactions as he was, a girl whose dolefulness and privacy he had respected and felt indebted to. No game-playing for her. No attempts to bring him out of his shell. But now she would not stop emoting. If he put his hand on her shoulder, if he asked her what was wrong …
“It’s okay,” she kept saying to him, between bouts of tears, holding her hands up as if aware of his dilemma; she continued to impress him, despite his overarching alarm, despite his impulse once more to flee. “It’s okay, really. My mom,” she explained, “my mother … ,” as if this more formal address might usher in more formal composure. But no. And later, in a hiccupping hush in which they could still hear the puppies sucking rhythmically, lustily, at the teats, she added, “I just remembered our dog. I don’t know how”—she took shallow breaths, heaving and stuttering, pulling in air to plunge on—“I don’t know how … I could possibly forget … about Max,” she said, and burst into another round of inconsolable wailing.
CHAPTER 7
DUDE,” HIS MALE EMPLOYEES and underlings had been greeting him all day as he made the rounds from one outpost to another. “Señor!” Clapping their youthful palms against his shoulders, or holding them up like starfish for him to slap in return, or making fists for him to bump with his own fist, these ritual admiring greetings, behavior bestowed by the apes, passed on via apish organizations such as football teams. Sometimes it seemed they meant to knock him down, clap him with enough gusto to illustrate their superior masculinity, the modern version of the bone-crushing handshake. Oliver Desplaines had known he would appear in the New Year’s Day edition of the Wichita Eagle-Beacon as one of the city’s ten Wichitans to Watch. He’d purposely not spread the news in advance, looking forward to hearing from people who would assure him he was a modest guy, a deserving hero; especially anticipating the Sweetheart’s exuberant elation: her new love, a celebrity.
“I’m making my rounds,” he’d said to Catherine before she’d risen from her bed or encountered the paper, bending down to kiss her forehead before she opened her eyes. A year ago, before the Sweetheart, it would have been her response he saved for last, after he’d been publicly heralded.
Did a life seem longer if you were leading two of them? Maybe. Since finding the Sweetheart, Oliver felt as if he were getting away with something, as if he’d happened upon a secret that others had missed, like a hidden chamber or a magic
power. He’d stumbled upon this secret before. The two lives could happily coexist for a while but not forever. YaYa, for example, meant to kill him when she discovered his affair with Leslie, when the private had overwhelmed the public life. Certainly she’d begun hating him as fiercely as she’d loved him, some logical proportional relationship, love to hate. Leslie, on the other hand, upon discovering his affair with Catherine, had seemed to wish to wilt and vanish, tired flower out of season, perhaps deserving of her punishment.
Simpler if his ex-wives were both dead, he considered. Or maybe not dead, exactly, but something like dead. Oliver had obligations to both of those women today. January 1 was the date agreed upon, long ago, on which he exchanged artwork with YaYa, the paintings they’d not been able to divide when they themselves had done so, that outrageously melodramatic separation. YaYa might have suggested literally cutting the contested paintings in half, severing and thereby ruining every single one. She lived at high volume, a lusty operatic figure at the mercy of her strong feelings, always acting before thinking, very Old Testament. The first thing she’d done was destroy their wedding photographs while their daughter Mary, fourteen years old, stood wailing as helpless witness. Cutting, ripping, burning. Next, YaYa had exhorted the girl to despise him, to make a team of two against him.
It wasn’t fair, Oliver always thought. He hadn’t betrayed his daughter, after all. He hadn’t quit loving her.
Mary was a painter, and the work he and YaYa traded back and forth was hers, her early precocious self-portraiture, the paintings that made sense of the whole collection, the recognizable girl wrought in a variety of settings—Mary in the sunlit flowers, Mary in the brutal night, the side of her that was demure, the side of her that was demonic. Eight altogether; the four that Oliver hadn’t seen since the year before were what allowed him to crate up the rest every January 1. He couldn’t have the girl, but he could have her art.
He had looked forward to wrapping his news, in the form of newspapers, around the small frames, slipping them in their crate, and shipping his honor to YaYa as if accidentally. And she would perhaps grudgingly pass along the information to the daughter they had in common, who also lived in San Francisco. It was Mary whose opinion mattered most to Oliver, she who had not forgiven him. Should her mother YaYa die, perhaps Mary would feel an urge to renew acquaintance with her father. He felt he might trade YaYa’s life for a fresh start with their daughter.
Did he love Mary because she refused to love him? Her paintings of herself created in him a special ache; he visited her recent work on Web sites, proud and mystified.
He’d anticipated his day in the public eye; however, when it dawned, and he spread the paper on the table, glasses cleaned and perched on his nose, the front-page spread struck him with a sudden wash of heat and dread, the sensation of a riptide or excruciating faux pas. All over town it was being digested; he realized he would have to accept the congratulations with a sardonic rather than genuine grin. What he’d not known was that he would share his place among nine other Wichitans to Watch with the likes of the local rediscovered serial killer. The real estate mogul named Bunny he could abide; the fellow who planned to erect a brass statue commemorating the Korean War with a dozen looming soldiers (his photo showing him with the tiny model bearing flags that would eventually be the size of billboards), okay. Commerce, patriotism, his own entrepreneurial gifts, the grant-grubbing preschool teacher, the eighty-year-old minister who ran the soup kitchen, hell or high water. But an unknown killer? In place of a picture, this figure was a dark anonymous silhouette, a graphic white question mark coiling from his head down his brain stem and throat to a white dot on the chest. Oliver was not unaccustomed to ironies such as these; but he had let down his guard, he realized, when he discovered that it hurt his pride. He did not want to be lumped into a group that included a serial killer. He’d allowed himself to think the honor meant something, falling into a sentimental civic pride in his own abilities, only too obliging to pose at Wheatlands, his most recent successful venture, with his grinning apprentices there, wearing an apron over his customary black turtleneck, teeth bared.
The Sweetheart, its manager, there beside him, his arm thrown brazenly, avuncularly, over her shoulder. He had been looking forward to imagining her staring at that picture, her eye drawn, as his was, to the absence of space between them there on the front page. A plausible couple, Oliver had been thinking. People in love. Out in the open yet utterly hidden.
Now when his employees were slapping his back, he felt he might buckle, his footing unsure rather than confident and fancy. He skated, he danced, he sidestepped; he worked very hard not to stumble. It was as if he were being sent back to childhood, demoted and undone, back to Lawton, Oklahoma. He went by Oliver, but that had been his own invention, derived from his middle name, which was, simply: O. Tribute to his Okie father’s best friend, O, the blacksmith with missing teeth and digits on all four extremities (frostbite, drunkenness, carelessness in the presence of sharp tools), a man whose name was also missing parts, a circle of emptiness, a name that stood for nothing, a zero on a sign, on a birth certificate. Oliver’s natural tendency toward hiding himself—renaming, re-origining—began early. First he discovered that he must hide his sensitivity, his troubling propensity toward tears. (“You should have been a girl,” his mother once told him, attempting to console him.) Later, he had to hide the barbed persona he’d erected to shield the earlier model, his constant sarcasm and criticism, the eye-rolling, scathing scoffing that in high school had garnered nothing but illiterate ill will, brutal daily beatings, and universal contempt: voted Most Likely to Never Come Back. Upon moving to Wichita, he’d reassigned himself: not Billy O, but Oliver; not an Okie but a New Yorker—he’d spent a few years there, after all, acquiring tastes. Never mind that the place had eventually frightened him, the way it could absorb him without noticing him. The way he was, in a city that size, not just anonymous but redundant, his type everywhere, and therefore unnecessary, invisible. In Wichita, he was unique. Here, he had become cosmopolitan and avant garde, humble, even, in some small way, an asset to the community, a person praised for not moving away and taking his talents with him. These were, he reminded himself (and would be reminded by others), vaguely flimsy distinctions, and could be eroded. He might teeter off his pedestal. What, besides a point of view, would separate his poise from pretentiousness?
“Saw you in the paper, man,” said yet another of his young admirers, this time accompanied by a wink along with the pervasive high-five hand. Oliver braced himself so as not to sway under its impact, felt the smack as if its germy content were the fateful coup de grâce.
Now he thought the award had the smell of prank on it. Somebody had known the serial killer would be included. Somebody, somewhere, wished to quite particularly humiliate him. Somebody who knew how precisely to insert this blade, a very thin and fine knife, more like a surgical laser, leaving results but no discernible sign of entry.
Paranoid! he scolded himself, exiting the celebration at Wheatlands (the Sweetheart never making eye contact, demure and blushing; they’d first embraced in the cold chill of the walk-in refrigerator, wordless, crucial, the scent of fermenting yeast surrounding them; now he could not know what she was thinking; he would find out later, when she got off work, when he reached the end of this taxing day).
He headed for the celebration at Kansa Karma. He had rescued the business by vetoing Spa-Licious and N-est-ce Spa, although he’d been too late to save them from unfortunate puns on their early marketing materials, lyrics from the odious and infectious “Karma Chameleon,” and often found himself whistling the tune when he walked through the spa’s otherwise tranquil space. His second wife had permitted this; she ran the spa with their daughter, Miriam. With these two women, unlike YaYa and Mary, he had an ongoing nearly daily relationship. Leslie was the most reasonable of his three wives, as well as the most dull. Because of the chaotic extravagance of his first wife, YaYa—the woman who demand
ed all the attention in the room, the elaborate liar, the promiscuous drunk, the insanely jealous—he’d somehow known he’d needed an earnest antidote, a woman who wouldn’t question his every comment, looking for a double entendre or a joke or a veiled insult. If YaYa lived in Wichita, if YaYa cared enough to keep up with local politics, if YaYa had any kind of pull in this city, it might have been she who’d make him a Wichitan to Watch alongside a murderer. That would have been right up her very vengeful, extravagant alley. It would have amused her no end.
It was she who’d ruined whistling for him, she whose parting shot had been, “Here’s some advice, Mid-Life Loser: you whistle like my grandpa Earl.”
He would wrap the paintings in bubble wrap.
The women in his life, past and present, would ask themselves and one another how he was going to handle turning seventy next summer. His birthday: a future embarrassment, not completely separate from the one today. A person being offered salutations at some ambiguous accolade. They would worry not about whether to throw a party (no one would risk that), but about whether to mention the day at all, or if so, to note his having rolled over into another decade, closer yet to the inevitable end.
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