Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  For a while I continued to roam the woods, going to our old haunts as if he were still with me. But without company the days grew long and the emptiness of the woods uncomfortably reminiscent of the winter sky in Connecticut. Pedaling aimlessly along an overgrown road far from civilization, I would suddenly be struck by the utter desolation of the scene around me. Landscape we had raced through, singing songs, laughing on our way to the quarry, the guava tree, or the deserted shack—the same landscape now struck straight through to my heart. It wasn’t a fear of bogeymen, or the dark, or even of the unknown in the usual sense of the word, it was the simple existence of the woods that scared me, the fact that it was all there, other than me, and much stronger than me. Gradually my area of operations narrowed from a fivemile to a one-mile circle, and eventually, as torpor overwhelmed me, to the immediate environs of the house.

  I was trapped—forced by some nameless and unconscious unease to spend my time at exactly that place where I was bound to be most unhappy. Jean’s and Dagmar’s arguing voices—tireless (in a sense it was as if only their voices argued; they became their voices), their ever increasing propensity for giving me pointless, dull, and occasionally humiliating chores to get me out of the way, their unbroken disapproval, set by now so deeply in their minds that it became the actual fabric of life for all of us, unquestioned by us, as if there were no alternative—these things, petty as they were, made me unhappy.

  I had nothing else, after all. An adult recognizes petty problems for what they are and transcends them through his higher preoccupations, his goals—he moves on, as it were. A child has no choice but to accept the immediate experiences of his life at face value. He isn’t moving on, he simply is. Children agonize over an overdue library book or an accidentally broken gas meter with all the emotion that an adult experiences at the threat of prison. The dominating elements of life at home were anger, boredom, and disapproval. Unlike Jean and Dagmar I had nothing else. My defense was to retreat. I became vague around the house. I didn’t see things. I didn’t hear things. In a way I suppose I went to sleep.

  We had three dogs. Dansker, a tawny boxer, Penny, a nervous, intelligent fox terrier, and Flossie, the clown, a bumbling, loose, droopy-eyed hound dog. Jean, undoubtedly responding to deeply buried memories of plantation life in aristocratic Louisiana, had built an elaborate kennel for them. A kennel so elaborate, in fact, with its three snug warrens and cement runway, that in many ways it seemed preferable to the main house. There was a drawback, though. I had to keep it clean.

  Penny was all right. She took neat, lady-like shits, usually firm, in the corner of the runway up against the fence. One pass of the shovel and everything was okay. The other two were less controlled. Dansker’s breeding might have shown if it hadn’t been for the example of Flossie depositing her formless turds with innocent self-abandon wherever they fell, fouling clean areas as well as dirty ones without the least sense of ritual or responsibility, without, in fact, the slightest indication in her eyes (I had watched her, crouched, pointing her rectum to the ground) that anything happening at the other end was of any importance whatever. She was such a blissfully stupid dog, like a brontosaurus, with its split nervous system and stunning idiocy. She crapped incessantly, expressing in this, as in everything else she did, the fact that something was seriously wrong with her. Not sickness (she was wonderfully healthy), or bad training, but some inbred genetic catastrophe, some hidden anatomical uniqueness making her not so much a dog as like a dog. Only in a world of abundance could she have existed at all. Half the food passed through her body untouched by the chemistry of digestion.

  Every evening at sundown I opened the gate, blocked their exit with my shovel, and slipped inside. (At least once I must have paused, leaned back against the chicken wire, and looked out at the immense wilderness surrounding us, the endless miles of sandy woods spreading out in every direction, where all the dogs in Chula Vista could crap for a thousand years without making a mark, where even I, Indian-style, gazing at a hawk in the sky or a line of ants climbing bark, had released my cigars since time out of mind.) The dogs would gather round, sniffing my feet and pressing against my legs. In her mindless enthusiasm Flossie had knocked me down more than once. As soon as I started pushing the shovel they would run into their houses as if ashamed of themselves.

  First a tour around the edge, up against the fence, shaking the shovel every now and then to equalize the load. At the slightest breeze I would stop, raise my head, and fill up with clean air. Once around, and I was back to the gate. Outside, I’d carry the load downwind, walking slowly to avoid accidents. In a corner of the lot I’d drop it on the sand, dig a hole (cleaning the shovel in the process), and go back for more. With the second load the worst was over. I buried it with satisfaction. Then I hosed down the runway (we had running water by then), the shovel, and of course my feet.

  Jean had accused me of getting sloppy with the shovel and leaving too much for the hose. It was true that around the perimeter of the kennel, just outside the chicken wire, a great deal of shit had collected in the sand, and it was also true that on hot days it smelled pretty bad, but I sprinkled a few handfuls of lime every week and never let it get entirely out of control.

  “It stinks,” Jean said one sweltering day.

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  What could he do? Take over? He gave me a pained look and walked away. Anyway, he’d pretty much given up the plantation image. In his mind the kennel had fallen into that large, familiar, and uninteresting category of Pure Ideas Destroyed by Impure Reality. Perhaps never before had there been so clear an example.

  She was calling me. I couldn’t see, but I knew she was standing in the front yard projecting her mezzo across the road into the woods, unaware that I was thirty yards away, safe in Flossie’s house. I’d been there for hours, dozing through the noon heat with the dogs, whispering to them, holding them against me. Her voice was meaningless. My name was meaningless. Sounds from out there barely reached me, lapping at the edge of consciousness like noise from distant radios. For weeks I’d been slipping away, not into the woods as they thought, but down on my hands and knees into Flossie’s warren, a wooden box six by three by three.

  Sunlight filtered through the cracks between the boards, striating my skin, strapping Flossie against my legs with white bands. Dansker and Penny were asleep next door, sighing every now and then like old horses, or occasionally twitching in their dreams, scratching their hard nails against the cement. It was past noon and the temperature was over a hundred. The air was heavy and motionless, dust motes frozen like specimens in glass. I stared at the bleached hairs on my arm.

  It was a microcosmic world, closed on all sides. Within it my body was so large as to be meaningless—the way the sky is large outside—an immense thing so vastly out of scale it could be forgotten. A fingernail was huge, one hair a complete and engrossing entity, the cement under my head like a close-up of the surface of the moon. Paradoxically the smallness of everything gave me the sensation of great space, I suppose because in some way I became as small as the things I contemplated: a flake of silica, a sand burr, a detail in the grain of a wallboard.

  When I was in college I had a powerful phonograph at the head of my bed. In the afternoons I would lie down with my ear a few inches from the speaker, listening to records. The effect was odd, and unexpected. Invariably I was driven into a halfsleep, literally beaten into unconsciousness by the tremendous noise pouring through my ears, as if my overloaded mind had to turn itself off. Something like that happened in Flossie’s warren. Images drove me under, images too strong to let through full force. Contemplating minutiae magnified, I drifted through the hours wrapped in a cloud of absent-mindedness. Faintly dizzy, half-asleep, and beyond time, I slipped gradually out of the world.

  A buzzing inside my head. My body is far away, much too far to respond to my wishes. I stare at my fingers curled on the floor. Immense, swollen fingers, weighty as sandbags. They are dead. I see nothi
ng except exactly what I am looking at, as if I were watching the world through a tube. When I shift my glance to the floor a few inches below my hand, my thumb and index finger disappear.

  It occurs to me that if I want to come back I’d better do it now because in a few moments it’ll be too late. Instantly I relax, letting myself be swept away. I don’t want to come back. The buzzing increases, swallowing me, drowning me until a mysterious change of frequency occurs and I come through into the clear, up above the buzzing into a silent, calm world, my heart bursting with happiness.

  Paradise! Light! Air! I am extended over vast spaces like a pure white cloud, drifting freely, roiling exuberantly in the sunlight high above the earth. I sail through the blue! I am everywhere!

  Or I lie on my stomach, my chin propped in my hands, watching elaborately plumed birds strutting by the side of a clear stream, ruffling their brilliant feathers with pompous arrogance. Suddenly two of the birds rush at each other in the air. Quick as a wink one of them is gone. Swallowed. A single yellow feather drifts down to settle on the moss. I laugh, delighted by the purity of it. I am aware of beauty flooding me like a balm, illuminating my insides, making me clean.

  From the corner of my eye I see a bird approaching me, gingerly stepping through the flowers, lifting its pronged feet high in the air. A miniature face peers at me from behind its wing. Out steps a tiny woman, smiling radiantly. She is five or six inches tall, and her face is neither beautiful nor ugly, but like a child’s drawing contains only those essentials necessary to make it recognizable. Instantly I realize she is the embodiment of all beauty. Her smile becomes more radiant, dazzling me. She is pleased by my recognition of her. My brain spins. It is all true! There is beauty beyond what I can imagine! There is a force somewhere that knows of my uniqueness and has judged me deserving, revealing itself. She nods, reading my thoughts, and somehow lets me know her own happiness at releasing me from ignorance. Everything is changed! I’ll never be ashamed again!

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “We know you. We’ve been watching you. You’re a good boy.”

  Together we levitate in the air, ascending through brightness into darkness. I sense she is leaving me.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m here.”

  “When will I see you again?”

  “When the time is right.”

  “Goodbye.” I send my voice into the darkness. “Goodbye.”

  Or I am a running dog—a lean black dog chasing Flossie through the woods. Effortless speed. My paws barely touch the sand as I streak past the underbrush. I could go on all day, never tiring, never stumbling. Flossie’s white hindquarters flash against the green, leaning first to the left and then to the right as she cuts in and out between the trees. Her shanks tremble as she clears a fallen log. Powerful limbs propel me high into the air. I’m almost on her. Coming down, I’m right in stride, all four feet close together, back legs snapping out the instant they strike the ground. She’s tiring. I nip the soft flesh beside her backbone. Now her whole body quivers even as she runs. I push with my shoulder, breaking her stride, and leap on her back.

  Stillness. We are in a clearing. The sand is hard and hot from the sun. She whimpers under me.

  “Frank! Frank!”

  A voice. Far away.

  “Fraaaank!”

  Repeated into meaninglessness, it ceases to be my name. Only an odd sound. Strange floating voices calling out. Voices that don’t expect to be answered, like the voices of ghosts.

  “Fraaaank!”

  Why are they calling? Whom are they calling?

  I remember waking up one night in my bed. The instant my eyes opened I was totally awake, aware of the stillness of the house and the hard white moonlight pouring in through the screen door in the kitchen. Lifting my blue jeans from the floor I crept quietly out of the house and stood naked in the yard, shaking them in case a scorpion had climbed into the material for warmth. The moon bathed my body like cool water, making my skin pale and showing up dozens of small scabies scars on my chest and arms. I touched them abstractedly with a fingertip, faintly sad that they were almost gone. (The disease itself had been uncomfortable, too itchy, but the marks amused me. Any kind of body occurrence was a source of satisfaction. I’d charted the course of a worm under the skin of my foot for weeks before it finally died.) I slipped on the jeans and went to the kennel.

  They weren’t asleep. Gathered at the door, their tails wagging, they seemed to understand the need for silence. Flossie swallowed a yelp as I entered. Like a skinny Buddha on the concrete floor I let them surround me, dealing out equitable love to them all, nodding my head to avoid their wet kisses. But after a few moments they left me and rambled nervously around the runway.

  Something was wrong. They were worked up. Penny stood with her muzzle against the chicken wire, her body shaking and her ears laid low. Dansker paced around the fence like a caged lioness, stopping every few strides to lift her head and sniff the air. Even Flossie was behaving strangely, starting off for a corner of the kennel only to stop in midstride for no apparent reason and shy off in another direction. I kept quite still and watched them, aware now of a certain alertness in myself. It was as if we were waiting for something.

  On the other side of the fence white sand stretched away into the distance. Smooth and luminous as a field of snow it ran out to the edge of the woods, stopping abruptly at a line of absolute blackness under the trees. In bright suspension up above were the staggered tops of the pines, moonlit, like floating Christmas trees. Two or three stars gleamed weakly near the horizon. Nothing moved.

  As if responding to an inner signal, a command that only she could hear, Dansker broke and ran directly at the fence, leaping up at the last moment to crash heavily against the wire. She fell to the ground, backed up, and jumped again, this time a little higher. Wincing involuntarily as she hit the concrete, I started toward her. I took one step—one step that she saw from the corner of her eye—and stopped. Her upper lip slid back and the short hair on the back of her neck rose straight into the air. Unable to believe that a dog I had slept with, wrestled with, ridden like a horse, and separated from fights with my bare hands would ever attack me, I took another step. She opened her mouth, cocking her head to one side, and faked an attack, lunging forward with terrific speed and stopping only at the last moment. Snarling—a sound so utterly feral I wouldn’t have believed it possible in a tamed animal—she watched me carefully, ready to leap. I backed away, my eyes holding hers. (Or perhaps hers holding mine?) Flossie and Penny were in separate corners, very still, leaning against the wire. They watched me sideways, their heads low.

  When I felt my back touch the wall I lowered my arms and stood quietly. Again and again Dansker ran at the fence, jumping higher with each attempt. It seemed to me she was taking a lot of punishment in the falls but it didn’t faze her. After a dozen tries she made a magnificent, soaring leap that took her almost to the top. Hind legs scrabbling frenetically, her unsheathed nails caught the chicken-wire at the last possible instant. With one awkward, twisting, desperate thrust she was up and over, falling through the air to the sand on the other side and away like a jack rabbit.

  Flossie and Penny went simultaneously insane, running at the fence with complete abandon. They seemed to know they hadn’t a hope of getting over and threw themselves against the wire as if to beat it down with the weight of their bodies.

  After a moment’s hesitation I went over and opened the gate. Still they threw themselves at the fence.

  “Hey Flossie! Penny! This way.”

  They turned, saw the open gate, and made a dash for it, their hind legs slipping out from under them. Streaking past my feet they hit the sand and leaned into a wide turn, running full tilt toward the woods. Flossie looked like a greyhound, her body folding with each stride as if her spine were one long hinge with the pin in the middle, opening and closing, opening and closing as she ran, her white paws barely touching the ground. Nearing the woods they seemed
to run faster. One moment they were there, and the next they were gone, swallowed by the blackness under the trees.

  I walked out across the sand, following their path for twenty or thirty yards, and then stopped. My shadow was ink black. Kneeling down, I raised my arm to make a swan and watched its beak open as I moved my thumb. My hands flapping, I did an eagle, then an alligator with teeth (very tricky) and a devil’s head. Drawing patterns in the sand, I combined them with the shadows. Finally bored, I sat back on my heels and watched the woods.

  After an hour or two I lay down. In the morning the sun would wake me while the others still slept.

  The dogs returned three days later. I found them gathered in the yard one morning, wagging their tails, slinking sheepishly away as I approached, all three of them mewing pathetically in an orgy of self-abasement. When they understood I wasn’t going to beat them they leaped on me joyfully, licking my neck and arms and tugging at my jeans. I took them out to the kennel and fed them, picking off the sand burrs while they ate. Except for ravenous hunger and a few scratches they didn’t seem any the worse for wear.

  It wasn’t the same after that. For some reason the kennel didn’t appeal to me any more. I don’t think it was so much Dansker’s behavior (she was a dog after all, and I knew any dog would regress if pushed hard enough) as it was the mysteriousness of what had happened. Why had they been so eager to get out? I realized I would never know, and my inability to share their most passionate moments disillusioned me. They had their own cabal from which I was excluded, and try as I might I would never really understand them. The discovery that the dogs, like humans, could not be taken for granted was hard for me.