Extreme Elvin (11 page)

She came up to help me. “Elvin you are fourteen years old. I did not get you a car. How irresponsible do you think I am?”

“I don’t know,” I said, letting go of the door when I realized there was no five-liter Mustang on the other side. “You let me get
this
bad, I figured maybe you’d let me be screwed up
and
happy.”

“Well,” she grunted, “I won’t.”

Finally, she got the thing up enough for us to slide under, while I stood there tapping my foot and saying, “I’m waiting.”

Though, in reality, I could have waited some more.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“No,” she squealed, all excited about what she’d done. “Come here, boy,” she said to it. “Come on. Come meet Elvin.”

“We’ve met. And he ain’t coming.”

So she went to him.

“He’s just a little worn out from all the excitement,” she said, picking up the little bundle of joy and cradling him like a camel-hair dog-faced baby.

She meant well. She really did. And mostly I liked her. She didn’t slap me around or bring home bald fat men who smelled like second-day souvlaki on a stick and called me “sport,” and she was there every day when I woke up and she fed me and laughed at my old
Monty Python
tapes even when nobody else knew what was going on. She bought me Mr. Bubble and then poured it into a Head & Shoulders bottle so that my friends wouldn’t see when they were prowling around the bathroom looking for clues. She was all frigging right.

“Ma, ya big goof,” I said. “Do you know what you bought?”

She played simple to keep me off balance. “A basset hound, I believe.”

“Wrong. You bought a throw pillow. And why? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking, mister grateful, that it would be nice if you had a puppy. A boy should have a puppy, and I realized you never had one. No puppy, no siblings, no father...”

She misted.

Hell.

Damn.

See, we don’t do this. Me and Ma, we have a nice tidy deal. She doesn’t mist on me and I don’t mist on her. There are better ways.

I chose to ignore it.

“So what did you do, Ma, did you, like,
advertise,
for the lamest, neediest, most useless lifeless beast in captivity?”

“Hell no,” she said. “Look what happened last time I did that.”

“What? What last...?”

Oh. I get it. Good one, Ma. She’s back.

“Actually, I needed help deciding, so I took Mikie with me. And he told me that you’ve had your eye on this little guy for a long time.”

Oh, now
there
was a move. Chalk one up for Mikie. Genius. Mikie the dead genius.

Ma was getting more attached to the thing every second. Squeezing him harder and harder, to no effect. The dog just kept molding himself to whatever shape necessary, parts of him collapsing, parts of him squeezing between her fingers like a water balloon. I got closer and patted him. He felt like a knot of laundry hot from the dryer.

“I just figured, El, you’ve been kind of mopey and lonely...”

“Oh, I get it,” I said, stepping back. “This is from when you caught me in my room, isn’t it! Ma, you thought I was... jeez... which I wasn’t—so you bought me a
dog?
First, I wasn’t doing what you thought I—”

“It’s all right, it’s all right.”

She shut her eyes tight when she said it.

“They had a monkey. It was a cute little squirrelly thing. But it kept doing... well, doing what
you
were doing, so I figured
that
was no solution.”

It was okay to rant at this point, don’t you think?

“But a dead basset hound, that’s a solution, Ma? Oh, wait a minute. I think you’re right. I think it’s working. I think I’m cured. Let’s go watch
Baywatch
and see if I need to run to the bathroom and jiggle the handle.”

“Elvin!” Ma gasped.

That’s the move. Shock the old lady into submission.

“He is
not
dead!”

So much for the provocation.

“The man in Puppy Palace said he’d probably be a little shocky for a few days...”

“Shocky? Well sure. The world’s changed a lot since he went in that front window. There were still four Beatles last time this dog saw the sun...”

“He is going to be fine, Elvin Bishop.”

Ah, the full religious flowering of my name. Sure sign the discussion is over.

“I got him for a very good price, and it included a ten-pound bag of—”

“Methadone?”

Ma and dog walked away from me then—well, Ma walked, dog draped—toward the house. I could see, by the hunch of her shoulders, by the scuffing of her feet, but most of all by the complete absence of anything like a joke, that I had done what I hadn’t meant to do. What I never meant to do. Not to my ma.

What to do, what to do? Like I said, emotional territory, not where we Bishops tread.

I caught up to them in the driveway. I wrestled him away from her, the two of us tugging on legs, scruff of neck, various and ample folds of excess dog. Dog appeared not to notice.

I won. I pulled him close, then draped him around my shoulders like a fox stole. “See,” I said, “a very useful dog.”

She started walking away.

I pulled her by the arm.

“I love him, Ma.”

She stared at me.

“Love.
Him. I love him so much. And I don’t even know what I would do without him.”

She smiled. I smiled. She went to the house. I went to the garage.

Dog went back to sleep.

B
UT YOU KNOW WHAT?
In her round-the-twist way, Ma was right. Dog started helping me out with my relationship thing. Thanks to him, I saw her again. The girl.

The
girl. The curlicue girl with the shining black hair, the round face, the eyelashes like two small Japanese fans waving out at the world, cooling the world just that little bit.

Except she made me warmer.

“Hi,” I said, and it was a struggle, coming out like ten or twelve syllables. I was standing there with Dog, in front of the Ark veterinary clinic where I was taking him to have his narcolepsy checked. She was coming out of the Indian restaurant next door, eating some yellow meat on a stick. “That looks good,” I said.

“Do I know you?” she asked, tilting her head like people do when they want you to know that they are not really puzzled at all but are, in fact, pretending to be for show. Only I didn’t care if she was faking or really confused or what, but when she tilted her head and closed one eye—
boom,
was the sound of that one eye closing—well all I could do was stand there trying to think up ways I could go on puzzling her so she’d look like that over and over again.

“This is my dog,” I said, holding Dog out like an offering of food. I realized I still had no name for him. Not that he deserved one. But people expect... “Grog,” I blurted. Pretty accurate, I thought, for a spur-of-the-moment christening.

“That’s a very nice name.” She didn’t really seem to think so. “But I asked,” she repeated, “do I know you?”

“Oh, yes, well sort of. We almost met at the dance last month. You were looking at me, and I was walking over to talk to you... come on, you remember...”

She tilted her head back in the other direction, closed the other eye—
boom.
It may have been that I had genuinely puzzled her this time, but it was all the same
boom
to me.

“Sure you remember. I was with a chunky guy. We were walking over to you... you were with a bunch of... other girls. But before I got there, my buddy bumped me...”

“Are you the guy with the scabies?” She pointed at me, aha style.

“No, I don’t have any—”

“Yes, now I remember. You’re the guy who gave scabies to poor Sally.”

“Now
that
is untrue. I can’t believe... no, that story has to stop.”

The girl waved at me and walked away, as if I had finished. I didn’t believe I had, though, so I pursued her. I put Grog down on the sidewalk. “Come on, Grog, come on,” I said, trotting on, until the leash tightened. I turned, and of course he was lying on the sidewalk like a basset-skin rug. I scooped him up and ran.

“No,” I insisted, catching up to the girl and walking alongside her. “Sally didn’t even
have
scabies, she had psoriasis.”

She shook her head. “Well, I don’t see how you could have given her that.”

“I didn’t. She gave
me,
that is, neither of us gave—”

“Did you catch it from him?” she asked, motioning toward Grog then quickly withdrawing her hand.

“What? Psoriasis? Dogs don’t get—”

“Scabies. Lots of times I hear people pick it up from their dogs. Is that why the two of you have to see the vet?”

Oh, she was good.

“I told you,” I said, “I don’t have scabies, and neither does he. He just doesn’t move, that’s his problem.”

She finished her yellow meat, offered the stick to Grog. To my surprise, he took it, but then just let it hang out of the corner of his droopy kisser like a movie detective with a cigarette.

Then she picked up the pace, as if the stick had been slowing her down. I struggled to keep up, carrying fifty thousand lifeless pounds of narcoleptic dog.

“Can you tell me your name, even?” I asked as she opened up a sizable lead on me.

She turned to face me while continuing to reverse out of my reach, out of my life. “Why am I of such interest now? It has been a month.”

Yikes. Do the questions continue to get harder?

“Or is it that your VD has finally cleared up so you’re back in circulation?”

Yup, the questions get harder.

Because she was right. See, you can know something for a minute, and then not know it again because... well because stuff gets in your line of vision. Or because stuff gets out of your line of vision. In this case, at that dance Franko bumped me off the beam. Sally got into my line of vision and this girl got out at the same time. Sally was lots of great things. She was beauty for sure and she was popularity, and she was all those things I thought were not that important to me but I suppose actually were. And then there was Frank buzzing in my ear and me the jerk totally unprepared for any of this and so.

So this one got bumped out and stayed out a whole month and I see her again and I’m thinking jerk again. Me, not her. Although it’s a very risky thing to do, sometimes Elvin needs to listen to Elvin. And I was telling myself the first time I saw this person, Yup. I said that. Yup. Yup. Yup. I knew it that time and now I was knowing it again and I could be sentenced to an outcast social group or to Devil’s Island but if this girl would change her mind and pay me some attention I would be lucky enough and happier than a jerk has a right to be.

“Hello?” she asked. “What is that, like a trance thing you do? You and the dog, you had like the exact same expression.”

“That was all a misunderstanding, all that stuff about...” Then it occurred to me, and I got one more cheap little thrill out of the situation. “So, are they saying that about me, over at St. Theresa’s?”

She turned once more and hurried off down the street.

Jerk, I said to myself.
This person would not be impressed by VD!

A little yip, sounded like a yup, came out of Grog. First sound I ever heard him make. Pretty sad little sound.

And then I made it too.

I forgot all about the appointment with the vet. Walked straight on home and then not only did I not do anything further to correct his behavior—or, his
lack
of behavior—I reinforced it by joining him.

“What is with the two of you?” Ma asked as she walked into the living room and found dog and boy both spread wide on the carpet the way sky divers look right after they deplane.

“We’re tired,” I said, convincingly, I think.

“How’d it go at the vet’s?” she asked, crouching down to stroke Grog and look into his one open eye. “Did they give you pills for him or something?”

“Ah,” I hemmed, “we didn’t exactly go to the vet’s.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I think he’s better. Y’know, we got all the way there, we were standing right in front of the place, about to walk in, and I swear, he made a sound. So I figure he’s cured, and we could save the twenty bucks.”

Now Ma looked at me very suspiciously. She left Grog and walked over to me on her knees. She stooped way down low, leaning on her elbows. Then she took her thumb and gently pulled one of my eyelids way open to scope my brain.

I braced myself for the joke. She had to. That’s what I would have done if I were her. But nothing like that came. First she pulled away from me, got to her feet. She stood, stared down in my direction, and smiled. No wiseguy smile at all. Almost an apologetic look, and surely unsure.

What she saw inside me she had never seen before.

No dope, my ma.

D
ON’T BOTHER EVER PLANNING
anything to go the way you want it to. That’s all I want to say.

I figured I slept for about a hundred hours. Fell asleep there on the rug, and barely remembered getting rousted by Ma and staggering to my bed. Grog, no slouch at the sleeping game himself, put up very little fight when she hauled him back to the garage.

“Ma!” I called when I woke up feeling mighty. She wasn’t around, and I needed to show mighty to somebody. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen, hands on hips, waiting. Then the back door opened. Calmly, arms folded, lips curled in a friendly snarl, Ma appeared before me. I took a deep breath to start again.

“Ma!” I announced. “Ma! I feel like this is going to be a big day for me. I can feel it, something’s going to
happen
today.”

Her smile broadened. “Something already has. Come with me,” she said, backing through the doorway the way she came, then leading me through the kitchen, out the back door, down the driveway to Grog’s apartment.

I heard a small chuckle bubble up from deep in her throat just before she heaved up the garage door.

“Oh my god,” I yelled, “Do something. Those rats are killing Grog. I
knew
we shouldn’t leave him in the garage.”

I looked away. Ma grabbed my face and pointed it back at the scene.