Last Days of the Dog-Men (2 page)

T
HE OTHER DAY
, H
AROLD SAT IN A CHAIR IN FRONT OF HIS
bedroom window, leaned back, and put his feet on the sill, and the whole window, frame and all, fell out into the weeds with a crash. I helped him seal the hole with polyethylene sheeting and duct tape and now there's a filtered effect to the light in the room that's quite nice on cool late afternoons.

There are clothes in the closets here, we don't know who they belong to. The front room and the dark attic are crammed with junk. Old space heaters in a pile in one comer, a big wooden canoe (cracked) with paddles, a set of barbells made from truck axles and wheel rims, a seamstress dummy with nipples painted on the breasts, some great old cane fly rods not too limber anymore, a big wooden Motorola radio, a rope ladder, a box of
Life
magazines, and a big stack of yellow newspapers from Mobile. And lots of other junk too numerous to name.

All four corners of the house slant toward the center, the back of the foyer being the floor's lowest point. You put a golf ball on the floor at any point in the house and it'll roll its way eventually, bumping lazily into baseboards and doors and discarded shoes and maybe a baseball mitt or a rolled-up rug slumped against the wall, to that low spot in the tall empty foyer where there's a power-line spool heaped with wadded old clothes like someone getting ready for a yard sale
cleaned out some dresser drawers and disappeared. The doors all misfit their frames, and on gusty mornings I have awakened to the dry tick and skid of dead leaves rolling under the gap at the bottom of the front door and into the foyer, rolling through the rooms like little tumbleweeds, to collect in the kitchen, where then in ones and twos and little groups they skitter out the open door to the backyard and on out across the field. It's a pleasant way to wake up, really. Sometimes I hang my head over the side of the big bed I use, the one with four rough-barked cedar logs for posts and which Harold said the mice used before I moved in, and I'll see this big old skink with pink spots on his slick black hide hunting along the crevice between the baseboard and the floor. His head disappears into the crevice, and he draws it out again chewing something, his long lipless jaws chomping down.

The house doors haven't seen a working lock in thirty or forty years. Harold never really thinks about security, though the bums walking on the road to Florida pass by here all the time and probably used this as a motel before Harold found it out here abandoned on his family's land and became an expatriate from town because, he says, he never again wants to live anywhere he can't step out onto the back porch and take a piss day or night.

The night I showed up looking for shelter I just opened up the front door because no one answered and I didn't know if Harold was way in the back of the big old house (he was) or what. I entered the foyer, and first I heard a clicking sound and Otis came
around the corner on his toes, claws tapping, his tail high, with a low growl. And then Harold walked in behind him, his rusty old .38 in his hand. He sleeps with it on a bookshelf not far from his bed, the one cheap bullet he owns next to the gun if it hasn't rolled off onto the floor.

The night that Phelan arrived to stay, fell through the door onto his back, and lay there looking up into the shadows of the high old foyer, Otis came clicking in and approached him slowly, hackles raised, lips curling fluidly against his old teeth, until his nose was just over Phelan's. And then he jumped back barking savagely when Phelan burst out like some slurring old thespian, “There plucking at his throat a great black beast shaped like a hound, ‘The Hound!,' cried Holmes, ‘Great Heavens!' half animal half demon, its eyes aglow its muzzles and hackles and dewlap outlined in flickering flame.”

“Phelan,” Harold said, “meet Otis.”

“Cerberus, you mean,” Phelan said, “my twelfth labor.” He raised his arms and spread his fingers before his eyes. “I have only my hands.”

H
OW
H
AROLD CAME TO BE ALONE IS THIS:
S
OPHIA, A SURVEYOR
for the highway department, fixed her sights on Harold and took advantage of his ways by drinking with him till two a.m. and then offering to drive him home, where she would put him to bed and ride him like a cowgirl. She told me this herself one night, and asked me to feel of her thighs, which were hard and
bulging as an ice skater's under her jeans. “I'm strong,” she whispered in my ear, cocking an eyebrow.

One evening, after she'd left, Harold stumbled out onto the porch where I sat smoking, bummed a cigarette, braced an arm against a porch post, and stood there taking a long piss out into the yard. He didn't say anything. He was naked. His hair was like a sheaf of windblown wheat against the moonlight coming down on the field and cutting a clean line of light along the edge of the porch. His pale body blue in that light. He kept standing there, his stream arcing out into the yard, sprayed to the east in the wind, breathing through his nose and smoking the cigarette with the smoke whipping away. There was a storm trying to blow in. I didn't have to say anything. You always know when you're close to out of control.

Sophia left paraphernalia around for Harold's fiancée Westley to find. Pairs of panties under the bed, a silky camisole slumped like a prostitute between two starched dress shirts in Harold's closet, a vial of fingernail polish in the silverware tray. It wasn't long before Westley walked out of the bathroom one day with a black brassiere, saying, “What's this thing doing hanging on the commode handle?” And it was pretty much over between Westley and Harold after that.

I must say that Sophia, who resembled a greyhound with her long nose and close-set eyes and her tremendous thighs, is the bridge between Harold's story and mine.

Because at first I wasn't cheating on Lois. Things
had become distant in the way they do after a marriage struggles through passionate possessive love and into the heartbreak of languishing love, before the vague incestuous love of the long-together. I got home one night when Lois and I were still together, heard something scramble on the living-room floor, and looked over to see this trembling thing shaped like a drawn bow, long needle-nose face looking at me as if over reading glasses, nose down, eyes up, cowed. He was aging. I eased over to him and pulled back ever so softly when as I reached my hand over he showed just a speck of white tooth along his black lip.

“I read that story in the
Journal
about them, and what happens to them when they can't race anymore,” she said. She'd simply called up the dog track, gone out to a kennel, and taken her pick.

She said since he was getting old, maybe he wouldn't be hard to control, and besides, she thought maybe I missed having a dog. It was an attempt, I guess, to make a connection. Or it was the administration of an opiate. I don't really know.

To exercise Spike, the retired greyhound, and to encourage a friendship between him and me, Lois had the two of us, man and dog, take up jogging. We'd go to the high school track, and Spike loved it. He'd trot about on the football field, snuffling here and there. Once he surprised and caught a real rabbit, and tore it to pieces. It must have brought back memories of his training days. You wouldn't think a racing dog could be like a pet dog, foolish and simple and friendly. But Spike was okay. We were pals. And then, after all the
weeks it took Spike and me to get back into shape, and after the incidental way in which my affair with Imelda down the street began out of our meeting and jogging together around the otherwise empty track, after weeks of capping our jog with a romp on the foam-rubber pole vault mattress just beyond the goalposts, Lois bicycled down to get me one night and rode silently up as Imelda and I lay naked except for our jogging shoes on the pole vault mattress, cooling down, Spike curled up at our feet. As she glided to a stop on the bicycle, Spike raised his head and wagged his tail. Seeing his true innocence, I felt a heavy knot form in my chest. When Lois just as silently turned the bicycle and pedaled away, Spike rose, stretched, and followed her home. Imelda and I hadn't moved.

“Oh, shit,” Imelda said. “Well, I guess it's all over.”

Imelda merely meant our affair, since her husband was a Navy dentist on a cruise in the Mediterranean, which had put Imelda temporarily in her parents' hometown, temporarily writing features for the
Journal
, and temporarily having an affair with me. It was Imelda's story on greyhounds that Lois had seen. It was Imelda who said she wanted to meet Spike, and it was I who knew exactly how this would go and gave in to the inexorable flow of it, combining our passive wills toward this very moment. And it was I who had to go home to Lois now that my marriage was ruined.

I
MELDA LEFT, AND
I
LAY THERE AWHILE LOOKING UP AT
the stars. It was early October, and straight up I could
see the bright clusters of Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Cygnus, and off to the right broad Hercules, in his flexing stance. I remembered how Lois and I used to make up constellations: there's my boss, she'd say, scratching his balls. There's Reagan's brain, she'd say. Where? The dim one. Where? That was the joke. Looking up at night usually made me feel as big as the sky, but now I felt like I was floating among them and lost. I got up and started the walk home. There was a little chill in the air, and the drying sweat tightened my skin. I smelled Imelda on my hands and wafting up from my shorts.

The door was unlocked. The lamp was on in the comer of the living room. The night-light was on in the hallway. I took off my running shoes and walked quietly down the hallway to the bedroom. I could see in the dim light that Lois was in bed, either asleep or pretending to be, facing the wall, her back to the doorway, the covers pulled up to her ears. She was still.

From my side of the bed, Spike watched me sleepily, stretched out, his head resting on his paws. I don't imagine I'd have had the courage to climb into bed and beg forgiveness, anyway. But seeing Spike already there made things clearer, and I crept back out to the den and onto the couch. I curled up beneath a small lap blanket and only then exhaled, breathing very carefully.

When I awoke stiff and guilty the next morning, Lois and Spike were gone. Some time around midafternoon, she came home alone. She was wearing a
pair of my old torn jeans and a baggy flannel shirt and a Braves cap pulled down over her eyes. We didn't speak. I went out into the garage and cleaned out junk that had been there for a couple of years, hauled it off to the dump in the truck, then came in and showered.

I smelled something delicious cooking in the kitchen. When I'd dressed and come out of the bedroom, the house was lighted only by a soft flickering from the dining room. Lois sat at her end of the table alone, eating. She paid me no attention as I stood in the doorway.

“Lois,” I said. “Where's Spike?”

She cut a piece of pork roast and chewed for a moment. Her hair was wet and combed straight back off her forehead. She wore eye makeup, bringing out the depth and what I have only a few times truly recognized as the astonishing beauty of her deep green eyes. Her polished nails glistened in the candlelight.

The table was set with our good china and silver and a very nice meal. She seemed like someone I'd only now just met, whom I'd walked in on by her own design. She looked at me, and my heart sank, and the knot that had formed in my chest the night before began to dissolve into sorrow.

“He was getting pretty old,” she said. She took a sip of wine, which was an expensive bottle we'd saved for a special occasion. “I had him put to sleep.”

I
'
M SURPRISED AT HOW OFTEN DOGS MAKE THE NEWS.
There was the one about the dog elected mayor of a town in California. And another about a dog that
could play the piano, I believe he was a schnauzer. More often, though, they're involved in criminal cases—dog bitings, dog pack attacks on children. I've seen several stories about dogs who shoot their masters. There was one of these in the stack of old
Mobile Registers
in the front room. “Dog Shoots, Kills Master,” the headline read. Way back in '59. How could you not read a story like that? The man carried his shotguns in his car. He stopped to talk to his relative on the road and let the dogs run. When his relative walked on, the man called his dogs. One of them jumped into the backseat and hit the trigger on a gun, which discharged and struck him “below the stomach,” the article said. The man hollered to his relative, “I'm shot!” and fell over in the ditch.

There was another article called “Death Row Dog,” about a dog that had killed so many cats in his neighborhood that a judge sentenced him to death. And another one sentenced to be moved to the country or die, just because he barked so much. There was another one like that just this year, about a condemned biter that won a last-minute reprieve. I'm told in medieval times animals were regularly put on trial, with witnesses and testimony and so forth. But it is relatively rare today.

One story, my favorite, was headlined “Dog Lady Claims Close Encounter.” It was about an old woman who lived alone with about forty-two dogs. Strays were drawn to her house, whereupon they disappeared from the streets forever. At night, when sirens passed on the streets of the town, a great howling rose from inside her walls. Then one day, the dogs' barking kept
on and on, raising a racket like they'd never done before. It went on all day, all that night, and was still going the next day. People passing the house on the sidewalk heard things slamming against the doors, saw dog claws scratching at the windowpanes, teeth gnawing at the sashes. Finally, the police broke in. Dogs burst through the open door never to be seen again. Trembling skeletons, who wouldn't eat their own kind, crouched in the comers, behind chairs. Dog shit everywhere, the stench was awful. They found dead dogs in the basement freezer, little shit dogs whole and bigger ones cut up into parts. Police started looking around for the woman's gnawed-up corpse, but she was nowhere to be found.