Under the Wolf, Under the Dog

by Adam Rapp

  Aunt Ricky is a former grammar-school teacher and when she speaks to you, it’s like she’s about to walk you step-by-step through a series of instructional flash cards.

  “Steven, honey,” she said to me while attempting to salvage the crusted galaxy of dirty dishes in the sink, “I’m only here till you guys get back on your feet.”

  She stopped washing dishes for a moment and adjusted the small wooden crucifix hanging outside her blouse.

  “It’s only temporary,” she continued, “and I don’t want you to think for even a minute that I’m trying to replace your mother.”

  I didn’t respond.

  I hadn’t said one word since I had been home, and I preferred it that way.

  Aunt Ricky would say things like, “Don’t pick at your shield, now.”

  And, “You’re very lucky to have gotten your sight back, Steven. You should thank Jesus.”

  It was true. By some small miracle, I had gotten all my sight back.

  In the kitchen light, Aunt Ricky’s skin had this totally industrial, extra-strength quality. When she walked more than three steps, it took so much effort you couldn’t help but anticipate some weird coronary disaster.

  I’m convinced that her obsession with Jesus was far more romantic than spiritual. I think she was actually attracted to him. I sincerely thought that one day while out on a grocery run, she would find some skinny, bearded, out-of-work Foote guy on the side of the road and, convinced that he was our anorectic Son of God, rescue him and head for some unincorporated Christian town in the middle of Illinois with a bingo hall and lots of roadside crucifixes, never to return.

  Aunt Ricky’s deceased husband, Uncle Mike, even looked a little like Jesus, I’m not kidding, or at least he looked like one of his apostles. After the Marines, Uncle Mike worked for the telephone company and fell out of one of those hydraulically lifted buckets and landed on his head and died of a broken neck. Since then, pretty much all Aunt Ricky does is accumulate garage-sale crucifixes and sleep with her collection of vintage rosaries.

  Between Aunt Ricky’s obsession with Jesus, my dad’s life in front of the TV, and Welton’s quiet, drug-induced romance with Sims and PlayStation II, I didn’t have much in common with anyone in my house.

  Aunt Ricky had been hard at work restoring the house to the way it was before my mom died. The living-room carpet had been vacuumed and treated with some totally floral-smelling powder. My dad’s TV Guide epidemic had been arranged in bright, perpendicular stacks. The windows sparkled. The sofa had been cleaned and sealed with so much Scotchgard you could practically smell the fumes all the way from the front yard. Even the TV looked new, but it had merely been cleaned. And there were plants on the windowsills!

  In the kitchen the floor gleamed and the countertops shone.

  My second day back from the hospital, Aunt Ricky came into my room and said, “I want to read this to you, Steven.” She spoke to me as if she was leading a troupe of Cub Scouts away from a bed of poison ivy. I was sitting at my desk, sort of just staring out the window. “It’s something from your mother’s journal,” she continued. “She gave it to one of her hospice nurses before she passed.”

  And yes, Aunt Ricky preferred to use that word passed, like my mom was a rowboat or a patch of bad weather or something. Then she sat down at the foot of my bed, produced a piece of folded paper, cleared her throat, and read the following:

  I’m grateful for each day. Every morning when my alarm goes off, I’m happy to be able to stretch my legs out, give my dog a pat, and thank God for another day. My favorite days are those when the sun streams through my lace curtains, but I even like the sound of rain pattering on my window or the wind moving the trees against the side of the house. It is morning that gives me hope.

  While she read it, I sort of left my body. The world outside the Nugent home was damp and cold. September was well upon us, and the trees along our street were all twisted like they had arthritis or something. Dogs barked and leaves whipped around yards in mini-tornadoes. Junior-high kids were driving BMX bikes and screeching down my street on their older brothers’ skateboards. Soon they would be wearing Halloween costumes and all would be good in the world of East Foote.

  “Do you have any thoughts about that, Steven?” Aunt Ricky asked, sort of wiping her cheeks. “About what I just read?”

  “No,” I said.

  She just sort of sat there, nervously scratching these huge pink streaks into her forearms. She had eczema, and it was pretty gross. Certain humans are built to suffer, and living with my aunt Ricky convinced me of this fact. Besides being horribly overweight, she possessed bad skin, arthritic hips, several gray teeth, a lazy eye, a trick knee, varicose veins, and thinning, dyed orange hair.

  “I understand your reticence, Steven,” she continued. “If you want to talk about things, just let me know. I’m here for you.”

  Then she began the depressing four-part move of rocking at the foot of my bed to gain the momentum to lift her mass in an Atlas-like rebellion against gravity. She got pretty out of breath doing it, too. Then she sort of brushed off her nylon sweatpants and waddled into the kitchen, where I could hear her doing the dishes for like an hour. It was weird, too, because there were hardly any dishes to do. I think Aunt Ricky did them over and over sometimes just because she didn’t know what else to do with her time.

  The reason I can quote my mom’s journal entry so well is because my aunt Ricky left it on my bed and I still have it.

  That same night I woke with a start.

  My bed felt all hard and wooden, like I was sleeping in a canoe or a floating coffin or something. I rose. I had this weird feeling that my room wasn’t my room anymore. I can’t quite explain why. It was almost like it was being prepared for some other kid or something. It was too clean. It smelled too fresh.

  I went out into the living room.

  The clock on the wall said it was four A.M. The house felt all weird and dead. The Sheetrock seemed to go on forever. Over by the TV there was this chocolate-icing handprint that had been on the wall since I was little. It was Welton’s and he made it when he was like nine years old or something and my mom always liked it so she never cleaned it off the wall. I was suddenly terrified that Aunt Ricky was going to paint over it, so what I did was I went into the kitchen, grabbed a hammer and nail out of the toolbox below the sink, went back out into the living room, and hammered the nail into the wall, right above Welton’s chocolate-icing handprint. Then I took my shirt off, which was just a regular white T-shirt with a few ketchup stains, and I hung it on the nail. What was this handprint, anyway? Was it some sort of weird warning of things to come? Was my brother giving us a sign, like, I’m going to press right through these walls if I don’t get the fuck out of here, or something like that?

  Soon Aunt Ricky would paint over all of these beautiful imperfections. The Nugent house was turning into some construction-paper cutout of a house. Inside there were a few stick figures modeled out of pipe cleaners and Scotch tape.

  I opened the door to my mom’s hospice room. The carpet had been replaced, and they had paneled over the walls. In this new bed that I had never seen before, my aunt Ricky was sleeping like some jungle beast that had survived a great hunt. Her mouth was sagging open. Her breathing sounded like furniture being dragged across the floor. I just stood there watching her for a moment. It was four A.M. and I was totally lost in my own house.

  “We didn’t have a dog!” I yelled. My own voice shocked me.

  “Wha?” Aunt Ricky replied, waking a little. Her nightgown was stained with these like continents of night sweat.

  “Steven,” she said, all wheezy and disoriented, “is that you, honey?”

  “We never had a fucking dog!” I screamed.

  At the time I honestly had no idea where this sentence came from. Now I realize that I was referring to what my mom had written on that piece of paper — that whole part about giving her dog a pat on the head.

  I could hear Welto
n playing some PlayStation II snowboarding game down in the basement. The game was taunting him, going, “You’re so lame!” over and over again. I imagined him staring at the graphics, not playing at all, trying to turn himself into the digital image of the snowboarder on the screen.

  “Are you hungry, Steven?” Aunt Ricky asked. “Would you like a snack?”

  That’s when I started barking.

  “Woof,” I said. “Woof, woof.”

  At first, the barking came out the way it sounds when it is written in a book, literally like “woof, woof,” but then it turned all carnivorous and savage, like I had rabies or whatever.

  “Horf, horf,” I screamed. “Horf-horf! Ruff-ruff-horf. Horf-horf-ruff-horf-ruff. Woof-woof-horf.”

  I heard a door close and then my dad was in the room. He was wearing this light-blue terry-cloth housecoat that was probably thirty years old. His shins were all white and hairless. The weird thing was that he had shaved and his hair was combed. I almost didn’t even recognize him.

  I stopped barking.

  He said, “Barking’s for dogs, Steven.”

  His voice was all weird and firm. Like he’d learned it at some seminar or like at Dad Camp or someplace. It was the first thing he had said to me since I’d left home.

  “Dogs aren’t allowed in the house,” he added.

  Aunt Ricky had propped herself up in the bed. In the four A.M. light, her wooden crucifix looked sort of like a weapon. Based on the expression on her face, she seemed pretty amazed.

  It almost seemed like my dad had gone away and someone else had taken his place. For some reason, he still couldn’t look at me. His eyes caught something on the wall and his hand rose up slowly and sort of caressed the grooves in the paneling. I walked past him and out into the hallway.

  On my way back to my room, I came upon Welton, standing next to my bedroom door. He had come up from the basement, and he looked totally spooked. He was naked, and he was sort of hunched over, clutching his back. His nudity seemed sad yet weirdly profound at the same time. It was like he knew some great, unbearable truth. His pupils were bigger than ever. He was obviously gone on Klonopin or Nembutal or whatever drug he and Dantly had experimented with that week.

  “You okay, Welton?” I asked, but my question didn’t register.

  “Lincoln was a better president, Steve,” he said.

  He was basically meat with a voice.

  “Better than who?” I asked.

  He said, “Better than Washington.”

  “Oh,” I replied.

  He added, “You can tell ’cause of the pictures. His beard and stuff.”

  Then he took my face in his hands and kissed me on the lips. His mouth was cold and dry. For a moment he stared into my eyes but nothing more was said.

  He is handsome, I remember thinking. He is way more handsome than I will ever be.

  After he kissed me, he turned and headed back down to the basement.

  29.

  The next morning I woke up starving.

  After I used the eye drops that Dr. Black had prescribed, for some reason I urinated sitting down and I just stayed there on the toilet seat for a while. I had no idea what my plans were. If the calendar was right, I would be starting back at the gifted school in less than a week. So many things had gone wrong. My mom had died. I’d nearly poked my eye out. I’d never made it to that creative writing class over at Carroll High School. It felt like the summer had been a terrible mistake.

  I could hear Welton’s TV in the basement. It was on some game show and the volume was up a little louder than normal.

  There was a knock on the front door. I walked through the living room and opened the door. Dantly stood on the other side of the entrance. He was naked from the chest up and his tattoos were all prolific and evil-looking. His nipples were pierced, too, and the light behind him made a weird halo around his body. The Skylark was idling in the driveway, smoke hurling from all sides.

  “Hey, dude,” he said.

  His voice sounded cut in half. His shoulders were so slumped, they looked like they’d been wrenched from their sockets. His stomach was all tense and ripped with muscles. I thought for a minute that maybe he’d been in some sort of accident and he was in shock.

  “Welton home?” he asked, hugging his shoulders. He couldn’t really stand still very well and his tattoos sort of danced around all blue and serpentine.

  “He’s down in the basement,” I said.

  “Can you like get him for me?”

  I went, “You can go down there.”

  He said, “I’m not walkin’ too good, bra,” and almost fell, but he used our mailbox to keep himself up. “We got into some heavy shit last night,” he added.

  “What happened?”

  “Let’s just say things got pretty dark.”

  I thought he was going to vomit in our mailbox — I really did.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, leaving Dantly at the doorway.

  Down in the basement, Welton’s door was three-quarters open. In his room The Price Is Right was on full volume. The Showcase Showdown music was blaring, and the studio audience was losing their minds. My brother’s room was a cyclone of laundry and compact disc jewel boxes and warped and ketchup-stained paper plates. There were broken things and melted things and stains that couldn’t be named. His computer screen was frozen on the Sims logo. His stereo had been turned down but a CD was spinning quietly. It was that Bottomside song “Forty Holes and Forty Goals.” I turned the TV off and the music played.

  there’s a hole

  in my head

  there’s a hole

  in my pocket

  there’s a hole

  in the floor

  there’s a hole

  in the door

  i’m gonna find it

  i’m gonna fill it

  there’s a hole

  After the song ended, I pressed stop and turned the stereo off.

  I turned around and there he was.

  He’d hanged himself from a coat hook at the top of the door. He’d used one of my dad’s old Marine Corps ties. He was nude and strange colors had settled into half of his face. Like blueberries and avocados.

  He was sort of kneeling.

  Like he was praying or planting grass.

  His testicles had swelled really large, and his penis was sort of half-erect. The weirdest thing about it all, though, was that he had defecated on the floor.

  For some reason I opened Welton’s mouth. I don’t know what I was looking for, maybe something miraculous like a baby bird or a gold coin.

  I just stared at him for a moment.

  “Hey,” I remember hearing my voice say.

  He had this totally awestruck expression on his face, almost like he was laughing, like someone had said something incredibly funny before he knotted the tie and dropped to his knees.

  I said, “Everything’s gonna be okay, okay?”

  His eyes were sort of blank and agreeable.

  Then I closed his door, which was actually really heavy, and headed back upstairs.

  Dantly was still holding on to our mailbox for dear life. His Skylark was spewing monoxide all over the neighborhood.

  “He’s not down there,” I said.

  Dantly said, “He’s not?” and the way he said it was like he was the victim of some horrible injustice.

  I shook my head no.

  “Well, where is the fucker?” he asked.

  “Somewhere else,” I said.

  He said, “Somewhere else?”

  I said, “Yeah, somewhere else.”

  “Where the fuck is that, bra?” he asked.

  I couldn’t answer and I wasn’t crying, and these were the two thoughts that were colliding in my skull like enemy birds.

  Then Dantly said, “Hey, man, what’s your name again?”

  I was like, “My name?”

  “Yeah, your name, bra.”

  “It’s Steve,” I said.

  “Steve —
right, right. Sorry, man.” Then he asked, “Do you know where Welton-I-Dealt-One keeps his stash?”

  I said, “What stash?”

  “His pills.”

  We went around to the backyard, and I dug up the spot where I had been stashing their pills in the “Itty-Bitty Pharmacy” Mason jar. I scooped up the dirt with my fingers and then Dantly joined me enthusiastically, almost athletically. He was suddenly wide-awake sober.

  After we unearthed the jar, I handed it to him and he stared at the assortment of pills as if they were miraculous candies made especially for the deliverance of his warped soul.

  “Golden,” he said, grinning his head off.

  His teeth looked glued on.

  His eyes looked like marbles.

  Then he said it again: “Golden.”

  And then he turned and left.

  Dantly’s bare back was the last thing about him that I remember. It was thin and muscular and zitless. A slightly tan, perfectly symmetrical back. A foot-long dragon sort of dived down between his shoulder blades. It was the back of a kung-fu hero.

  A minute later I could hear his car door close and the Skylark pull away down the street.

  I sat in the backyard for a long time. Sort of like I was at a picnic. Like there were hot dogs coming. Hot dogs and potato salad or whatever. The grass was hard and starting to lose its color. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at. The last few blackbirds were trying to nip at worms and other bugs that had already bored farther into the hard, cold earth.

  It suddenly felt like the fall, and my only brother was dead.

  30.

  At Welton’s funeral, my cousin Grace wanted to see my eye.

  “Show me,” she said, sitting down next to me in the pew. “Come on.”

  But I wouldn’t pull back the shield. I just shook my head and sat there.

  St. Rose’s was pretty depressing that morning, but there was some nice colored sunlight passing through the stained-glass windows and it felt sort of peaceful to just sit.