Barking Man (4 page)

Mr. Chalk was fairly new to the town; he’d done a lot of work in the prisons and he wasn’t known for wasting his words. A few people crept up near to listen for what he’d find to tell a man like Jackson, which was this:

“Well, you’re still here,” Mr. Chalk was heard to say.

Jackson spat on the snow and said, “What of it?”

“You’re surviving,” Mr. Chalk said. “Today’s today and then there’ll be tomorrow.”

“That’s right, and it’s a curse,” Peter Jackson said, and turned on the priest with the tunnels of his eyes. “I been cursed with survival,” he said then, speaking in a different tone than before, as if, after all, it were a new discovery.

That spring he didn’t plant tobacco. Round about the time he should have been, he was driving all around the county looking at dogs, and going clear to Nashville too. He looked at all the good-sized breeds: collies, Great Danes, German shepherds. There was a story that went along with it, which got out and made the rounds. Funny how many people got to hear of it, because it was a personal kind of a thing for a man like Peter Jackson to go telling.

It appeared that when Peter Jackson was born, his parents had a big old dog that they let live in the house and all. Jackson didn’t recall himself what breed of a dog it might have been and there wasn’t anybody for him to ask, because his parents were long dead and he never had any brothers or sisters. Anyway, they had worried the dog might eat the baby when they brought him home but it turned out the opposite: the dog loved the child. So much so that in the long run they trusted the dog to watch the baby. They might go out and work their land or even leave the place altogether for a short spell, knowing the dog would see everything was all right. This all happened at that same place at Keyhole Lake, and one time, so the story went, little Peter Jackson, only two or three years old, let himself out of the house somehow and went wandering all the way down to the shore. This old dog went right along with him, saw he didn’t drown himself or get hurt any other way, and in the end when the child was tired, the dog brought him on back home.

So Peter Jackson spent that spring driving practically all over creation, looking at different kinds of dogs, and when people wondered how he could be so choosy when he didn’t even appear to know what it was he wanted, that was the tale he would tell them. Finally he ended up at the place of this woman way out the Lebanon Road who bred Dobermans. He went out and looked at her dogs a while and went home and came back another day and told her, “Let me have two of them.”

“What do you mean, two?” she said. “Do you even know if you want one? Which two did you have in mind, anyway?”

“Pick me out two likely ones,” Peter Jackson said. “A male and a female. Ones that ain’t too close related.” And the next thing anybody knew, he was breeding Dobermans himself. Rebuilt his old drying barn into kennels and fenced in some pens out in front of it. Told anybody who cared to know that Dobermans weren’t naturally mean like they had the name for, but that they were smart and naturally loyal and would be inclined to protect you and your house and land without any special training. Although he could supply the training too, if that was what you wanted. He started selling a good many as pets and maybe an equal number as guard dogs. That was about the time the K-9 patrols came into style, so he drew business from the police, and in a year or so people were coming good long distances, even from out of state at times, to buy their dogs from Peter Jackson. He was thought to be so good at it that eventually people began to bring him dogs that other trainers couldn’t handle. Which may have been what first gave him the notion of taking in those boys.

Marvin Ferguson, the county judge, was the man Jackson had to go see about this idea. In Franklin, the county judge doubles up as juvenile judge too, so Ferguson had the management of whatsoever people under seventeen or eighteen couldn’t seem to keep themselves out of trouble. Of which there were always a few that he couldn’t quite figure out what to do with. It was kind of left-handed work for him to be doing anyway. Still, he was leery of Jackson’s idea at first. Because Jackson wasn’t getting any younger, was he? and his place was clear the hell and gone from anywhere else to speak of, and who knew just how bone-mean some of those boys might turn out to be? But after they had talked a while they arrived at an understanding. When Peter Jackson had gone on home, Judge Ferguson pulled his file on a boy named Willard Clement, and pretty soon he was on the phone arranging for a deputy to drive the boy out to Jackson’s place.

The highway runs on the near side of the ridge from the lake, and you got to Peter Jackson’s by turning off on a little old dirt driveway that came up over the crest of the hill and dipped down on the other side to stop in front of Jackson’s house, an old log house that had been clapboarded over and added on to a couple or three times. A ways below the house were the dog pens, and any time a car turned in, all those dogs would start in barking. Past the kennels a trail went winding down the hill and twisted in amongst the cedars; you couldn’t see quite how it got there from above, but way on down it came out near the little dock where Jackson kept a pirogue tied, for when he wanted to paddle out on the lake and fish.

But the first thing a stranger would be apt to notice, coming over that rise, would be the lake itself. It always looked sort of surprising from the ridgetop. It isn’t really keyhole-shaped, just narrow at one end and wide at the other. How come they give it that name is that the middle of the wide part is so deep nobody ever found the bottom, and somebody had the idea it was like that part of a keyhole that just goes clear on through the door. From up by Peter Jackson’s house you could always see how the color of the water would change as it neared the middle, homing in on that deep dark circle of blue.

Jackson’s dogs stayed in the pens, all but two that were his pets; them he let live in the house and have the run of the whole place. Bronwen he called one of them and the other was Caesar. All his dogs had peculiar names like that, which he looked up in books. When the deputy pulled in to deliver Willard Clement, he found Jackson waiting out in the yard, the two dogs on either side of him. The deputy unlocked Willard out of that caged-up back seat and brought him on down to get introduced. Jackson said hello and then made both of the dogs put up their paws to shake—they were that well trained, almost like folks. Then he turned around all of a sudden and pointed back up the hill and called out, “Hit it, Bronwen,” and snapped his fingers twice. The dog went bounding up the hill and jumped up in the air and locked her jaws on a piece of two-by-four Jackson had nailed between two cedar trunks about five feet off of the ground, and she just kept right on hanging there, her whole weight on her teeth so to speak, until Jackson said. “All right, leggo, Bronwen,” and then she dropped down. Willard Clement was staring googly-eyed, and you could just practically see it, the deputy said, how any thought he might have had of causing Peter Jackson some type of trouble was evaporating clean out of his mind.

Jackson put Willard Clement up in what had been Richard’s room, and that’s where he put all the others that came along after him. He kept them busy working with the dogs, first just putting the food out and cleaning the pens, and later on taking them for exercise and helping with the training some. The boys mostly stayed out there six weeks to two months, which was long enough to learn a little something about how to train a dog. And the work told on them, gentled them down some. A number kept on working with animals, one way or another, after they were done their stay at Jackson’s. Willard Clement, I believe, finally became a vet.

You couldn’t miss the difference in those boys, between the time they got dropped off out there and the time they got picked up again. You’d drive one of them out there locked into the back like something that had rabies, maybe, but when you went back to go get him, likely he’d look like somebody you could trust to ride in the front seat alongside of you. He would be saying
Yes sir
and
No sir
and standing up straight and looking you in the eye. Nobody quite knew what Jackson practiced on those boys, but whatever it was it seemed to work. And a good few of them seemed to really be grateful for it too. There were some that tried going back out to visit him, a lot later on once they were grown, but the funny thing was that Jackson himself never seemed to care too much about seeing any of them again.

There must have been eight or ten of those boys between Clement and Don Bantry. Anyway, he’d been having them for near about two years. There hadn’t been a one of them he’d failed to turn around, either, else they probably never would have thought of sending Bantry out there, because that boy was a tough nut to crack. He was about sixteen at that time, but already big as a man. What he was most recently in trouble for was beating up a teacher at the high school and breaking his arm, but there was a long string of things leading up to that: liquor and pot, some car stealing, a burglary, suspicion of a rape he never got tried on. They wouldn’t have him at the reform school again, just flat-out wouldn’t. Ferguson was in a toss-up whether to try and figure some way to get him tried as an adult or send him out to Jackson’s a while, and what he decided shows you how he’d come to think that Peter Jackson was magic.

Bantry had sort of short bowlegs, but big shoulders and longish arms. He had a pelt of heavy black hair all over him, and even his eyebrows met in the middle. He looked a good deal like an ape, and he wasn’t above acting like one too. Well, the deputy turned him out of the car, and Jackson had Bronwen and Caesar put up their paws, but Bantry wasn’t having any of that. “Ain’t shaking hands with no goddamn dog,” he said. But it wasn’t the first time one of them had said it.

Jackson had Caesar run hit that two-by-four and hang by his jaws a half minute or so. You couldn’t have told what Bantry thought, his face never showed a thing, but that trick had always worked before, so the deputy left on out of there. And right from the start, it was war.

Jackson went and got a shovel and handed it to Bantry. Explained to him how to go about cleaning out those dog pens, where he’d find the wheelbarrow at, where to go dump all he shoveled up. Bantry didn’t reach to take hold of the shovel, so Jackson finally just let it drop and lean against his shoulder.

“Better get a move on,” Jackson said, or something about like it, and then he started walking back down toward the house. He was halfway there when he heard some kind of a noise or shout and turned around in time to see Bantry flinging the shovel like a spear, not quite at him but close enough in his general direction that Bronwen and Caesar started growling. Jackson told the dogs to stay. Bantry had turned and started walking up the drive, where the dust of the deputy’s car had not yet even settled, like he didn’t know it was at least twenty miles to anywhere else, or didn’t care, either one.

“Come on back here before I have the dogs bring you,” Peter Jackson called after him.

Bantry kept walking, didn’t even glance back. He was near the top of the hill when the dogs got to him, and he swung around and tried to get off a kick, but before he could land one, Bronwen had him by the one arm and Caesar by the other. They clamped on to him just short of breaking his skin and started dragging him on back down the drive to where the shovel had landed, just like Jackson had said they would. Bantry came along with them, had no choice, as long as he didn’t want his arms torn off. His face was fish white, but Peter Jackson thought it was anger more than fear. Bantry was not the kind that scared easy, though he was sharp enough to know a fight he couldn’t win. This time when Jackson offered him the shovel he took it, and he went on and cleaned out the dog runs. For the next week, ten days or so, whatever Jackson told him to do he did it, but did it like a slave, not looking at him or speaking either. He never said anything at all unless he was asked a question, not even at the supper table.

Jackson had a dog named Olwen, with seven pups near ready to wean. He had Bantry feeding the puppies their oatmeal and all. One day when Bantry was coming out of Olwen’s run, Jackson snapped his fingers to Caesar. The dog hit Bantry square in the chest, knocked him over flat on his back and stood over him with that whole mouthful of teeth showing white and needle sharp. With all that, Bantry kept most of his cool. He turned his head to one side, slowly, and called out to Peter Jackson.

“What I do now?”

“You been doing something to Olwen’s puppies,” Jackson told him, walking up closer.

“You never seen me,” Bantry said.

“But I still know it,” Jackson said. “And if you don’t stop, I’ll know that too.” And he let Bantry lay and think on that a minute before he called Caesar to leave him get back up.

Another week or so went by, Bantry doing his work with his head bowed down, not speaking until he was spoken to and then answering short as he could. Till one evening when Jackson was starting to cook supper and felt like he had a headache coming on. Bantry had just fed Bronwen and Caesar on the kitchen floor, so they were busy over their pans. Jackson stepped into his bedroom to get himself an aspirin, and then Bantry was in there right behind him, already shutting and bolting the door.

“You been waiting your chance quite a while, hadn’t you, boy?” Jackson said. And straightaway he hit Bantry over the eye, twisting his fist so it would cut. He thought if he surprised him he might win, or anyway get a chance to open the door back up. But Bantry didn’t have his reputation for nothing. Jackson got in a couple more shots and thought maybe he was doing all right, when next thing he knew he was lying on the floor not able to get up again. Then it was quiet for a minute or two except for the dogs scrabbling at the outside of the door. Every so often one or the other would back off and get a running start and throw himself up against it.

“You fight okay for an old man,” Bantry said, panting. It was about his first volunteer word since he got there. “But you still lost.” Jackson didn’t answer him. It was hurting him too much to breathe right then. Bantry reached a handkerchief off the dresser and dabbed at the cut above his eye. Then he picked up the keys of Jackson’s truck and twirled the ring around his finger.