The Dogs of Detroit

by Brad Felver

  What happened? the uncle demands, but Wiley cannot answer. His boiling blood pumps through his cracked cheek and throbbing eye. Thick drops form in his tear duct as if he is crying blood. Then the sound of the uncle rattling in the toolbox, finding the flat-blade screwdriver, the knowledge of what is to come.

  Then Helen is standing over him. His vision is blurry. He paws at his face, which is puffy and raw. His broken eye socket has not been reset. He feels the bandages cinching his thumbs, feels them pulse against the swelling.

  Helen lifts his head, pours hot sorghum rum down his throat. He swallows and coughs. My eye, he says.

  I know, she says. Don’t worry, she says.

  The mother’s flesh grays nearly overnight. Her spine slumps, and she no longer wakes first with her peacocks. Some quiet plague has infected them, and the mother’s limbs swell and darken with a brutal malignancy. Helen bends over her, sleeping little. She worries not just of her mother’s condition but of her own fate if she dies.

  The uncle carries on as before. He does not speak to Wiley, though he does tend to the mother when she coughs and moans during the night. They all seem to understand that she will die soon, though no one knows what to call her disease and no one speaks of it. It is not an uncommon thing in such a place to grow sick suddenly and die of a nameless contamination.

  For Wiley, it is as if some hulking and unseen banshee has descended upon his world. The uncle’s torture is not new, nor is the threat of the mother’s death. He paws at his pinched socket often. The eyelid will not close fully now, and even his hearing has grown strained from it, the vibrations of sound plunging into a hollow conduit and then rattling at the base of his neck. More than all this, it is the thought of the of ape man returning that tortures him. Even the uncle, who claims he does not believe the story, does not touch the rotting mule.

  The carcass festers on the porch, freezing and thawing along with the weather’s fluctuations. Patches of its mane still grip the neck, but much of its hair has fallen off and sticks between the cracks of the floorboards. Vultures have eaten most of its paunch, ripped strings of its bowels out and flown away with them in their beaks like fat worms. The reek of it chokes the house and even the barnyard. The golden ring still hangs from the rope, though it would take only a small tug to free it from the mule’s bit.

  Early March and Wiley walks the long rows and plants the grains with the uncle. The soil remains hard, and they must till much of it with a spud bar since they no longer have the mule to drag the plow. They carve long rows of cockeyed V’s, trickle sorghum seeds, and cover them. And they wait, long hours they wait for green leaves to sprout and for the ape man to appear on the horizon.

  Mid-spring, and the mother wilts and dies. It is slow and loud. For weeks no one sleeps at night because her moans rattle even the spoons and forks in the drawer. Her gray skin yellows and opens as if gangrene speeds through her veins. Helen does not leave her often, only to fill buckets of cold water and to clean puss from the rags that bathe her forehead. She listens to the mother’s rattly breathing when she sleeps, and this is when the uncle descends.

  We need fresh bread, he says to her. I need my shirt washed, he says. Come sit with me, he says, and pats the lumpy cushion next to him.

  Go torture a scarecrow! she shouts at him, and he leaves her to tend to the mother, though his eyes always trace back toward her. She can feel his eyes, and she knows the way of things in this world, the way of replacements, and his desire for more field hands.

  They bury the mother at sunrise in early spring when the frost has withdrawn for the season. Wiley fashions a headstone by breaking off barn siding and cinching it with twine. He carves into it the word Mother, digs a trench, and anchors it into the ground above her. Then they all stand and look down at it, and no one speaks. Helen grips Wiley’s hand, and the silence infects them until they are all afraid to move.

  That night there are no animal noises from the bedroom, but they hear the uncle’s sobs. He has shown no regret in front of them, no trace of sadness, but the awful tempest within him unleashes with the loneliness. He has lost so much with her. For a moment Helen feels for him, the howling and tortured beast that cannot not be domesticated by this world. He has no place but on his lonely dust farm, no capacity to comprehend the fundamental order he has disturbed.

  The harvest is slow in the summer as Wiley and the uncle must scythe and hack the heavy stalks and drag them by hand. Wiley replaces the mule at the sorghum press, circling for long hours as the uncle feeds the brambles in to be mashed. The orbital bone will not set properly, and so his face is locked in a perpetual and lopsided grimace. Even his smile appears sinister, like some malevolent marionette with its strings drawn too tight.

  For three years they carry on this way, Wiley growing strong, growing weary. He does not speak of the ape man or of his delayed return, but he thinks of it daily and fears both his appearance and his absence.

  Maybe he died, Helen says at breakfast.

  Wiley glares at her and says nothing. He sits quietly, looks down. We need more coffee, he says.

  His shoulder muscles bulge now from the long workdays with no mule, and his forearms have tanned and grown veiny. Long scars carve his hands and up to his elbows, scars from working sharp tools beyond his capacities. And he has grown serious, agonies scored about his face, and for this, the uncle commends him. This, he says, is how we become capable men. It was the same for me. One day, he says, you’ll have your own mule, and the burdens will ease.

  Helen has grown tall and thin. Her face has hardened, and though she is not beautiful, she is still too beautiful for such a place. Her wiry muscles also stretch as she works the field next to Wiley. He will rarely let her from his sight. It is only Wiley and his thick muscles, his glower, that keeps the uncle away from their bedroom at night.

  The mule carcass has melted away, and all that remains are the bones: ribcage and legs and enormous hips, untouched all this time. The rope has detached from the bridle, and so nothing keeps the ring shackled to it. The ape man’s plan has worked, and yet he does not return. The uncle avoids the porch because this would acknowledge the truth of Wiley’s story, but he does not order the bones cleaned up.

  And they wait for the ape man. It is four years, then five, and still Wiley knows he will return. He must return. The uncle still pretends there is no ape man, but in all this time he has not removed the mule bones, has not ordered Wiley to do so. Still they cling to the front porch. They have yellowed, and dirt cakes into the eye sockets.

  The uncle has withered. Whether from the endless toil or the thought of the ape man or the death of his sister, it is hard to explain. He sleeps late and eats little, and when Wiley needs an extra hand, he shouts in to Helen. When the uncle drinks too much sorghum rum, Wiley smacks his temples red with the flat of his callused hands. You drink our dinner, you fool! he shouts at the uncle. Helen must sit between them at dinner as Wiley stares at the uncle, seething. More than once she has pulled her brother away for fear he would kill the uncle with his fists.

  The absent ape man breeds a meanness in Wiley that was never there before. Every day he has not returned, Wiley’s shoulders coil tighter until he snaps even at Helen. He is a hulking specter of the towheaded boy he was, scowling and clenching a cob pipe between his yellowed teeth. He glowers down at Helen, and it is not unlike the looks the uncle gave her years earlier. She fears what the world makes him into. Wiley claims to want only enough saved income to purchase an old tractor—an Allis-Chalmers or Farmall or even a newer Deutz. He will never buy a mule. He is convinced they might undo the land’s blight, and their own, with modern implements. Helen thinks he is perhaps correct in this, that the endless toil and inch-thick calluses have animalized him. He growls more than he speaks, often eats while standing and with his dirty hands.

  Seven years after the ape man, the uncle dies. He has lost nearly half his body weight, and his knuckles bulge. He drinks much of the season’s rum, and Wiley allow
s it because it pacifies him.

  Before he dies, the uncle waves Wiley over. They sit at the kitchen table in summer, but it is chilly, and Wiley stokes the coals. The uncle and Wiley sit quietly for a while, the uncle drawing his thin, wheezing breaths, and Wiley inhaling the heavy plumes from his cob pipe. The wind gusts through the siding and into the kitchen, swirling dirt about the floorboards.

  What did he look like? the uncle asks, and Wiley knows what he means.

  Wiley describes the scars and the tattoos. He mentions the pox blemishes. He pauses, and then he describes the ape arms. They dangled, he says, like twine, longer than his legs. He carried a jungle gun, an African thing made for elephants and lions. He was like a circus show, more animal than man. His speech quickens, and he describes the mule’s exploding brain, how it burst like a squeezed seed. He has not spoken this many words together in a year. He tells the uncle of the storm the night before and of wrestling Helen in the mud pit.

  The uncle smiles at him. He even laughs, though it erupts like a cough. Wiley pulls out a wad of handkerchief, hands it to the uncle.

  The uncle coughs blood into the handkerchief. And what if he comes back? he asks. What do you do then?

  Wiley has thought of little else for years, but he has no answer and never will. He looks down.

  You see? the uncle says. There are worse things out there than me.

  He is dead the next day, and they bury him beside the mother. Helen clasps Wiley’s thick forearm as they look down at the mounded dirt. Wiley has made no marker for it and has no plans to add one. There are enough remnants of the uncle around them.

  Wiley thinks about how they might build another room for the house, another bedroom. Scour the porch clean of mule, wall it in. Buy another cot, a nightstand, an oil lamp. They will sleep in separate rooms and work their hardened farm as they must, behave as they must. How then he might venture out with all their savings, leverage the old Hudson, the farm itself. Yes, sir, he’ll say, head bent. The older one there. The ’18 Fordson, sir. No, sir, I understand. I’ll work the bearings back into shape, sir. Wiley will return home with their tractor one morning, riding high atop it like a conqueror. He will call out to his sister so she might see his arrival, see as he pulls into the lane, circles a lap around the house, and parks it next to the sorghum press.

  The Era of Good Feelings

  When my father died, my mother didn’t hide her annoyance. “In February?” she said, looking out the back window to the snow-covered plot our family had used for more than a hundred years. “Christ.”

  “The Garchers have that backhoe,” I reminded her. “No one’s expecting you to go out there with a spade.”

  “Which they’ll charge us to rent.”

  She was right about that. The Garchers were our nearest neighbor, four hundred yards to the east. They ran almost six hundred acres, which counted as rich for the area. They made a big show out of eating at the new Applebee’s in town. I’d gone to school with Charlie Garcher, a toady, stupid boy who became a toady, stupid man. When I went off to college, he stayed home. When I came back to be a history teacher and help my father run the farm, I returned to student loans and the same flood-prone tract as when I’d left, but Charlie had inherited another four hundred acres and had no loans. It’s hard not to resent the fools who succeed because they have no ambition.

  “We flat don’t have money for a funeral,” my mother said.

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  “People always say that when they don’t know how to figure it out.”

  I could see she needed to wallow for a while. Despair scabs over grief when we need it to. My mother and father had the kind of marriage where they loved each other, yes, but every year it seemed less relevant. They had a farm to run and bills to pay. Who had time to be in love?

  My mother disappeared into the kitchen to cook something we didn’t need, and I dialed Charlie Garcher. “Dad died last night,” I said.

  “Sorry to hear that. Need the backhoe?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble. Tomorrow probably.”

  “It’s no trouble. Same as usual?” he asked, meaning the rate.

  “It’s fine, Charlie,” I said and hung up.

  After that I called my principal, Hal Owens. Hal was a good enough guy. We used to fish crappie together before he became principal. He was from Massachusetts, but he’d been in Ohio for almost twenty years, so people were starting to warm to him. “Don’t tell anyone,” I said. “I don’t want a million phone calls right now.”

  “Sure, of course,” Hal said. “Take a few days. Let them read about it in the paper.” He was probably relieved at the thought of me taking a little time off. The week before, one of my American Government students, Cassidey Duluth, barged into the teacher’s lounge looking for me, calling me by my first name, Ralph, claiming we had some sort of appointment which we didn’t have. Another teacher complained, and word reached Hal. The suggestion of impropriety was strong enough to trigger an investigation, probably because Cassidey was pretty, and pretty people conjure the image of sex just by being present. I found it all very confusing. I hadn’t had much more than a whiff of sex in years, not since a short marriage and a long divorce, but if you keep your eyes open in these parts, you can see a storm coming from a long way off.

  After I hung up, it occurred to me that my father was still in bed, which is where he died. My mother had found him, stiff and cold, that morning. (She would later admit after a few drinks at the wake that she had suspected he was dead in the middle of the night since he wasn’t snoring. Did you actually fall back to sleep? I asked her. I dozed, she said.) I went out to the barn and unfolded a couple of sawhorses and set an old piece of ply on top. There was a big oil stain on one side, so I flipped it over to the other side, which had a smaller oil stain. Then I went in and pulled my father out of bed and hauled him out to the barn. Rigor mortis had already set in, which made him feel stiff and breakable. I grabbed him up under the armpits and tried to lift him all the way but couldn’t. I didn’t want to drag him, but that’s what I ended up doing, his feet cutting these creases in the snow of the barnyard, which I would stomp over on my way back to the house, hoping my mother wouldn’t have to see them. I set him on the piece of ply and shut the barn door. It would stay cold enough for a day.

  I went back inside and sat down at the desk with a mug of rye to write his obituary. This was Friday, and the paper ran on Saturday mornings, which meant we could do the funeral and wake Saturday evening.

  What did I want to say about my father? He was a tough old bird, I wrote at first and then scratched it out because it was stupid cliché. You don’t call your father a tough old bird to a town full of tough old birds. I realized that about home the first week I went away to college and was surrounded by suburbanites who thought hay and straw were the same thing and that grocery stores made all their own food on site. I wrote about how he served honorably in the Pacific. Killed himself many Japs, I wrote, and then scratched that out too because I thought it was funny in an ironic sort of way that most people would think was serious and patriotic. Loving father and husband, a man who worked the good earth his whole life. Truth is, the life of a farmer is all about repetition. You’re tethered to the calendar, and you end up in this orbit, and before you know it fifty years have gone by and all that’s different is that your barn now has aluminum siding. I wrote down a few more platitudes and gave the information about the wake and the funeral and decided I needed to stop because it was just too sad how I could hardly hit fifty words for a man who’d lived to eighty.

  Things would change now, and it wasn’t clear how we’d cover bills. Probably we’d have to lease the land out to Charlie Garcher for nickels on what it was worth, which would allow us to sell off some equipment. That thought burned me up, Garchers running plow on my family’s land like a horde of stinking barbarians. My family bought this farm when James Monroe was president. That was called the Era of Good Feelings. In a lot
of ways, that was as good as it ever got for a small farmer, 1817 or so, and it’s been a humiliating struggle ever since.

  It wasn’t even noon by this point, and I was thinking of going in to school to teach the last couple bells of the day. I had a nice group for American Government. A few of them would go on to college, and one or two might end up with jobs where they wore collared shirts. Cassidey Duluth wasn’t one of them.

  I went to the kitchen to check in on my mother. She was frying eggs. “You hungry?”

  “No,” I said.

  A couple minutes later she set an egg sandwich down in front of me, and I ate it mindlessly in about four bites. “I’m going to teach the last couple bells,” I told her. “Then I’ll see about a casket.” The casket was a reach; a headstone was a non-starter.

  “We don’t have money for that.”

  “I’ll figure something out.” I’d learned from my father that if you just order something first and worry about how to pay for it later, the whole situation really becomes somebody else’s problem. Who would come repossess a casket?

  “I still need to call your brother and tell him.”

  I hadn’t even thought of my brother. He worked at a bank over in Fort Wayne, which meant we didn’t know how to talk to each other anymore.

  I took the long route to school, which wound me all the way around the Garcher place. I guess I wanted to torture myself. Charlie himself was out getting the mail at the end of their lane, and he waved at me, so I pulled off for a minute.

  “Sorry to hear about the old man,” he said. “He was a tough old bird.”