She watched his fists jump, and she listened to him snore; it was, she realized, the sound that someone might make who was drowning, or being choked. And then, with a final sorrow made part of the motion itself, remembering her sad, reluctant motions with the dark, cruel man who had worked her body so brilliantly, Louise gave in, and shifted in the bed to lay her full attention on Gerry’s face, as one might lay a palm along a lover’s cheek, connecting, caressing, taking hold.
His eyelids fluttered. His jaw worked as he ground his teeth. In light the color of yarrow, his face seemed made of shadows. Its many emptinesses reminded her of giant boulders dragged into fields by glaciers; they were scoured, full of shallow pits, and what had sculpted them was gone. He worked his jaws, or whatever worked him made his jaws chew against each other. He had stopped snoring, now, and he was breathing enormously, taking breaths so profoundly deep that, watching the eyelids flutter, watching the bones of his face compress, she waited with her own breath held to be certain that he would finish one and start again.
That’s love, isn’t it? That kind of worrying?
When she heard herself think the question, she felt herself start to cry. The tears came slowly and they ran down her face. She pushed at them with the backs of her hands as she watched him in his tortured sleep. Then his eyes rolled faster under his lids, and he clacked his mouth open and shut a few times. “Blaw” was the sound his gravelly voice said. “Blaw.” She recognized the noise from memories of her own scared dreams. It was what you said to ward off whatever impended in your nightmare. “Blaw.” But then, and with no warning, he backhanded with his left arm and slammed his fist backward into her pillow. His voice going higher even as he shouted it, he warned, “Don’t assault me.” He threw his right, and he screamed, “Blaw!”
The wide, clumsy punch caught her left shoulder and pushed her back on the bed. She caught his hand. She held it. She knew its weight, and the temperature of it’s skin, the dark fur on its forearm. She didn’t know whether to kiss it, or continue to hold it, or whisper to him that he only dreamed, then kiss him on the cheek and lie beside him until he slept without fear. Only?
She astonished herself by throwing his arm back against him. “Don’t you abuse me, you son of a bitch!” she shouted, and as she did she heard the echo in her words of his own dreamy voice. She punched at him clumsily, like a girl, she thought, swinging wildly until he woke, frightened, of course, and confused, saying, “What? What?” But he traveled all the way from the borders of dreaming, through her weeping, her shouts and her blows, to find her, to fight through her punches, to clutch her against him. She knew, as he seized her, that he did so in ignorance of what had happened inside him or inside her, or in the room between them. Gerry hugged her to himself and gave what dumb and uninvited comfort he could. She knew he did. And she, now, reached to comfort in return. She felt his drenched T-shirt and thick blunt ribs, and she held herself against them, thinking Caught.
THE PAGE
THAT NIGHT I did what I had always done. It was how I’d been managing. Every morning I did what I always did, and every afternoon and night. Pooh lurched out with me while Bear slammed him into my legs and led us off the back porch. Bear was ten months old, a Labrador retriever long of muzzle and leg with vast paws. The old one, Pooh—my wife had named him—was lamed by arthritis, half blinded by cataracts, crippled by dysplasia, and still too strong to die. I placated the secrets of his physiology with Butazolidin tablets and dog biscuits. At that time, I was especially grateful when a patient or dog did not die.
It was unusually cold for early November, and the pumpkins I’d set out, because it had been the custom of the house, were settling into themselves as successive frosts softened them. No one came up our road for Halloween, but I had placed pumpkins on the front and back porches and had even fastened onto the storm doors the bunches of maize we’d always hung there. No one came to our house at Halloween because it was so remote, and because the pickings were better in town, five miles below. I had walked about, from kitchen to pantry through kitchen back to living room, waiting to give some little kids some lollipops and candy bars, but no one had come to claim them. I had thought to console myself with Tootsie Pops, but I learned from their high, artificial sweetness that I didn’t believe in consolation.
Pooh staggered around the bushes in the side yard, and I heard Bear rustling in the tall, withered grass below us. He was in the field that went down a hundred yards or so to the old apple trees on which gnarled, sour apples would gleam in the morning through winter. Pooh came back and lay down beside me with a grunt. I didn’t hear the puppy and I whistled him back. He didn’t come. I clapped my hands and called him. I heard slow winds and the natural sway of weeds against each other, but nothing caused by the intrepid unintelligence of a young dog rushing home. I called again, and listened, and then put Pooh inside, stuck a long-handled flashlight in the pocket of my barn coat, and, leaving the porch light on, went looking.
I walked through the fields I’d last seen him in. I walked the road parallel to the fields. I went down to the old apple trees, then past them and past the old fence and over the small creek. I followed it in the dark down through the aspen forest to where it foamed in a little waterfall. My shoes and trouser legs were soaked, and my hands ached from the cold. I had fallen a couple of times and had not, I noted, sprung lithely back up. There were creatures around me, field rats and maybe an owl, but there wasn’t a stalky, imperfect Labrador retriever who knew less about handling himself in these woods than the average beginning Boy Scout.
I fell again as I bushwhacked up to the house, and, speaking of tenderfoots, this time I opened up some skin and broke my flashlight. “Bear,” I shouted in the darkness, a little embarrassed by the panic I heard above the grass that insisted on making noises, in the freshening wind, as if something coursed in instant response to my call.
I found another flashlight that worked, and then I drove the car back and forth on our road. I went miles in each direction, pausing to aim the flashlight through my opened windows at the grounds of every trailer, double-wide, shack and farmhouse I passed. There weren’t that many, and the dog was at none of them. At home, I locked up and, sitting in wet clothes and a shirt with blood on the right cuff, I said to the old dog that the puppy would doubtless come back in the middle of the night, that he was running a deer or ferreting in somebody’s compost heap. “You wake me when he comes,” I told Pooh before I went up. He hadn’t made it upstairs for a couple of years.
Dogs drift. They stray. They take off because of a smell, a sound, something inside their skulls that is part of what makes them other than us. I fell asleep in our bed and not that much later I woke, as I’d been waking for a while, to the sound of my voice. I took a bathrobe downstairs with me and passed the sofa onto which Pooh, in spite of his lameness, was able to haul himself every night. I went to the other sofa and lay beneath one of the heavy old quilts.
Looking out from under it, I said to Pooh, “Any word?”
His cloudy eye glittered in the darkness of the living room and then it closed.
After hospital rounds the next morning, I drove the twenty miles home because I knew that Bear would be sitting on the porch, looking, as usual, bewildered. He was not. I drove back, and I continued to wrestle with my imagination as I’d done, fairly successfully, the night before. Every time I saw the dog cringing from headlights on a two-lane highway, or, tail down and back curved in fear, crouching over his forepaws in a dark forest that felt alien, I pulled down the wide black window shade I remembered my grade school teachers hauling on small pulleys so that we could better see a film strip on how corn grows or why the washing of one’s hands is a precious errand and a high responsibility. I drew the black blind between me and the terrified Labrador, who’d been struck with a stick by a man at his trap line, or who was bleeding from the flanks where he’d been shot with a hunting bow, or who ran at a sideways angle, slower and slower, because of his kicked-in ribs.
Instead of eating lunch before my clinic hours, I drove home again, pulling the blind as I needed to, and inspected the house and the grounds. I drove with the windows open and the radio off so I could hear him, and so I could whistle for him as I drove. Past Dorney Walters Road, past Sanitarium Road, I signaled to him, in case he was caught, or lost, or injured, that I was here, that this—toward the sound of my calling and calling—was how to come home.
After work that day, at a quarter of six, before I went back to feed Pooh, to maybe find a young black dog on my porch, I telephoned my daughter’s office. I lay in the swivel chair and let my tired feet dangle. I thought I was in danger of talking about Bear, but I wanted to be certain I was calm for her, even casual, so I rehearsed. You know that dumb-ass puppy took off on me, I said. Probably got himself lost in the hills or near the river, I said. I thought about rivers, how fast and deep and cold they were. I’d never put ID collars on the dogs because I didn’t want them getting snagged and drowned in rivers or streams. I said to her, I have to confess I’m getting worried, and if I had put them in collars then maybe someone, finding him, could call me. Maybe he wouldn’t be lost or mistreated or frightened someplace. I pulled on the long white sash cord, and the broad black screen came down. She wasn’t in, and I went out and drove back, climbing into the wild hills I lived in with, apparently, one less dog.
I remembered what I had actually said to myself in rehearsal for my daughter and then had chosen to dismiss: if they wore collars, I had said in my thoughts, then maybe someone could find me. I was reminded of something. I thought I knew what, but I drew the blind back down and, once I saw that nothing—no one were the words I heard in my head—was lying, all muzzle and ears and big, dark eyes, on the porch, I went through the business of the early evening without allowing myself a glimpse of what I didn’t want to see. I took Pooh out and hung around the yard while he limped from bush to rock to fence post. “You do your rounds,” I told him, “and I do mine. And you piss up posts a good deal better than I do.” Then I fed him and thought about feeding me, but settled for some slices of cheddar somewhat spotted with blue-green mold. I chewed on one for a while and then, leaning over the garbage pail, which direly needed emptying, I spat the mouthful out. I was reminded, again, and again I drew the screen up. But I’d remembered by then. I thought to call my daughter and tell her how close I’d come that night to conversing with her mother again. But I put my coat on, instead, and went out with Pooh, the two of us crabbing our way up the road half a mile or so, Pooh marking and sniffing and glaring with his opalescent eyes, me calling with, I heard, such desperation that I sounded like a warning, not a request to please come back.
The next morning, I called the Sheriff’s Department and spoke to one of the dispatchers I was friendly with. I worked in the jail as their doctor one night a week, inspecting prisoners, and I knew most of them well enough. I asked if the deputies on patrol could keep an eye out for Bear. I learned the names of the area dog wardens, and I telephoned descriptions to two of them, leaving a message for the third. I called four veterinarians to ask if anyone had brought Bear in. I called the SPCA. Now everyone knew that one more dog was missing. I let Pooh out for a final pee, then locked him in and went to work. On the way, I stopped at the offices of our newspaper and paid for a large ad. I headed it REWARD. The woman behind the counter watched the pencil, then looked up at me. She looked, and then she said, “Family pet, huh? Everybody takes it hard.”
“Do they?”
“Like a child’s gone, sometimes,” she said.
“Really,” I said. “That serious.”
“Look at you,” she said. “Here. Let go of the pencil. I write these all the time.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s tough work.”
“No,” she said, studying the form she printed on, “what’s tough is having dogs, I’d say.”
One strep throat, one battered baby whose mother was a battered wife, a half dozen leaky sinuses, one possible appendix, one definite milk allergy, a third pneumonia for the week, and the bonus—sixteen normal, healthy kids—and I was done and driving home. I stopped at the seasonal road a quarter of a mile from the house and parked with my windows open. I whistled for him. I listened to the strengthening winds in the evergreens before me on the hillside and to the dry grass rattling on the slope below. They were so much louder and more powerful, and I stopped my little noises and sat there awhile. An airplane engine tore up the sound of the wind, and I saw a light plane banking a couple of hundred feet above, then climbing to crest the hill that overlooked the house. The plane circled in slow, widening loops. I thought—the way you laugh hysterically—of finding a way to ask the pilot to look for Bear on the fields of yellowing grass and bony weed and corn stubble that lay on the other side of the ridge.
Yes, I admitted that night, while I admitted that the screen didn’t work and that I dreamed the dreams and saw the sights—the whites of the eyes of a puppy in terror, the dry protruding tongue of a dog as he died of poisoned bait, the hiss on leaves of the blood that pumped from his wounds. Yes. All right, I thought, another triumph for lovers of realism everywhere. Yes. It was like mourning again. All right?
Before I left for work the next day, after I drank coffee and turned the radio on and then off, I fetched from the back pantry, from its cubby among field guides and travel books, our gazetteer of New York State with its precise topographical drawings. I looked down at the often unconcentric indications of the sloughs and rivers. There were so many roads and hillsides above them, too many forests and steep, thicketed fields.
I picked up our newspaper on my way to the hospital and I read the ad. She had rearranged my incoherent phrases well enough. It was placed at the top of a column containing three other notices of missing dogs. I visited my patients, three of whom were improving and one, Roger Pettefoy, an infant, who was dehydrated from diarrhea. We had caught his bacterial infection, but the antibiotics, I thought, had given him diarrhea. I asked Charlene Novak to throw some electrolytes into him and asked to be telephoned late that afternoon about his progress. On the way home, I shopped. Two women who had known us asked if they could help me. I smiled at one and moved on. She let me go. The other, who fell on me in an unsteady manner, all yellowing teeth and loose flesh, was not satisfied with my thanks, and she pursued me. I stopped and turned, wheeling my cart as if it were a shield. She retreated several paces with her own cart. She wore a fur coat over what looked like pajamas, and she smelled of gin. The idea of a martini became interesting. I said, “Ms. Wiermeyer? Widdemeyer. Forgive me. You’re being kind, I know. But I really remember, if barely, how to buy short-grain rice. My hesitation, here in aisle five, is because the store seems to carry only long-grain rice. I’d intended to make myself a spinach risotto for dinner. Hence the desirability of short grains, as I’m certain you know. So I’m considering my choice, which lies between long-grain and processed. I’m only fucked up, Ms. Widdemeyer, not stupid.”
That afternoon, a boy rode up on a bicycle, rare enough on our stretch of road. Pooh let him know by yelping at the bike, even after the boy climbed off it. Pooh’s rich growling bark had turned to something of a yap. A lesson for us all, I thought, as I went out the front. The boy was fourteen, probably, pimpled over a pallor he owed to canned gravies on dehydrated mashed potatoes and plenty of sweet sodas. I smelled his cigarettes and unwashed skin.
He said, not looking at my face, “You the man advertising the reward?”
“For a dog,” I said stupidly.
“Dog,” he said, patting Pooh’s head. “Black puppy, it says, except he’s pretty damned big for a puppy.”
“Kind of dopey-looking ears and a little white spot on his chest?”
“Yupper,” he said, breaking the word into two syllables and landing heavily on the second. “Kind of cute.”
“Did you call him by his name?”
“Bear,” he said. “Pretty near tore the damned chain off of him.”
“Chain,” I said, taking my wallet out and counting to a hundred.
He described the trailer off the road and its short gravel driveway, the long chain fastened to its riserless wooden steps and the black dog held by a collar that looked to be made of chain as well.
“A choker, maybe,” I said. “It tightens up the more the dog pulls on it.”
He nodded. “Could have been,” he said. But I knew that he’d agree, now, to anything because he saw more money in the wallet.
“When you go home,” I said, “be sure and keep one of those twenties to yourself, if you know what I mean.”
“Yupper,” he said, mounting the bike and looking like all these big country boys caught between handlebars and steering wheels—too long and lean for the squat kids’ bicycle, and a little bit angry, as if he knew how he looked.
I checked Pooh’s water dish, then locked him in and drove to the trailer. I had paused at the door of my house, wanting to heft something. This was an emergency, and it might require equipment. I thought about flashlight, ax, splitting maul, garden spade, a serrated bread slicer, or one of the French cooking knives. Finally, I took my medical bag. I wanted to know what I was doing, no matter what I had to do, and my professional tools seemed best.
I turned up a road I rarely traveled because it was not only seasonal—unplowed during the winter—but because it was unpaved and seemed to be made of potholes linked by rocks. I went slowly, rehearsing my conversation with whoever had Bear. I would have to pay another reward. I would have to have a discussion, I supposed. I would have to perhaps undergo a berating for carelessness and maybe listen to complaints about scattered garbage or the scratched-up walls of a shed or the stain on a rug. The trailer was at the edge of a state hardwood plantation. Once a year, those who’d been chosen in a lottery were permitted to log firewood. For a few weeks, the forest screamed and trees fell and pickups tottered back and forth under heavy loads. Then these woods felt dark again when I drove past the road that went through them, and there was a good silence from them—unless you had driven there to call the name of a missing dog.
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 24
