Last Days of the Dog-Men (5 page)

One day they were standing on the beach and birds started to fall out of the sky.

“Oh,” one of the birders cried, “it's a tanager fallout.” A momentary alarm shook Agnes, naturally associating the word with its nuclear meaning. But then she caught on, birds plopping to the white sand all around them. Bright red birds with black wings and black tails, and dull yellow birds amongst them.

They'd stood still, as had all the others for some minutes, and then people began to get down on their hands and knees and take close-up pictures of the birds, who were too exhausted to move another feather. People picked them up and stroked them and set them back down. Before they could stop him, Bob—who'd cautiously sniffed at one bird—began taking them into his jaws and dropping them at her and Pops's feet like gifts. Some of the birders got upset and started hollering like fools until Pops got Bob back on the leash and kept him from retrieving any more tanagers.

“He ain't a retriever,” Pops said later. “He's built for killing small animals. He knows we like the birds, I guess.”

That day, Agnes had stood there, the startling scarlet birds falling around her, and listened to the surf bashing at the sand, and she could see the churning tidal struggle down at the point, at the mouth of the bay. She looked out over the Gulf and thought about the birds having crossed all that water without even a rest, and she thought about the fishes and other creatures that traveled beneath those waters, strong and free as they pleased, roaming without the boundaries of continents or countries or cities and towns or jobs or houses or yards, and the idea of the freedom of such a journey stirred in her something like joy and something like frustration. She didn't know what to do with it, this feeling, and she felt so strange standing amidst these people struck wild with wonder over the tanager fallout while all she could feel was the most curious detachment from it all.

S
HE DECIDED SHE NEEDED TO GO TO THE POOL AND ON A
whim thought it'd be nice to drive Lura over there with her. If Lura liked so much to go, then she'd give her somewhere to go
to
. She knew Lura wouldn't swim, but it might be nice for her to sit in the shade and watch the others. Agnes put her swimsuit on and slipped a slightly faded sundress over it, got into her sandals and sunglasses, and went over to fetch Lura.

Lura was sitting in her automatic chair and she fumbled for the button, pushed it, and the chair began to rise slowly until it slid Lura out onto the floor on her feet and then sat there like a sproinged jack-in-the-box while Lura went into the kitchen to get Agnes a bowl of homemade ice cream.

“I don't want any ice cream,” Agnes said. “Let's get in my car and go over to the swimming pool.”

“I made this cream last week and it's still good, but I can't eat it all,” Lura said.

“I thought,” Agnes said loudly then, thinking maybe Lura didn't have her hearing aid in, “that I would give you some
place
to
go
, instead of just wandering. And you wouldn't have to drive.”

“Well, I like to drive,” Lura said, fiddling in her silverware drawer. “I can drive just fine.”

“I didn't say you
couldn't
drive, Lura. I just thought you might like to go someplace with
me
.”

“Well, I can drive us to the pool,” Lura said, like someone who'd been insulted.

Agnes felt her stomach knot up just thinking about riding with Lura, but she could see what this was turning into and went on out and got into Lura's car and rolled down her window. After what must have been a quarter of an hour, Lura finally came down her back-porch steps wearing a light cotton dress with a floral print and carrying a wide, floppy garden hat that looked like a collapsed sombrero. She put the hat onto the seat between them and got in behind the giant steering wheel of the Impala. She looked like a child driving a city bus, Agnes thought.

Then Lura began her driving ritual. She pulled on her white cotton gloves and fished her keys out of her purse, chose the proper key, and inserted it into the ignition. She pumped the accelerator pedal one time with the toe of her sandal, then turned the key. The old engine turned over once, coughed, then died with a hydraulic sigh. Lura pumped again, turned the key, the engine wheezed once, caught, and Lura held her foot down until the car roared like a dump truck. She let it die back, and gently pulled the gear stick down into Reverse. The transmission made its familiar clanking noise, Agnes felt the bump of the car into gear, and Lura placed both gloved hands on the wheel and peered into the rearview mirror as she began her journey out of her driveway. Obliquely, and true to her lights, she leaned the Impala's right fender into her pink azaleas, and the thin and agonized atonal chorus of stems against paint and metal began.

“Oh, Lord,” Agnes muttered. “Here we go.”

Clank clank, into Drive, Lura pulled forward. Clank clank, into Reverse.

“Lura,” Agnes said.
“Lura.”
Lura pressed on the brake pedal and looked at her.

“Why don't you use the
side
mirror,” Agnes said.

Lura looked at her blankly.

“If you just keep your left fender close to the bushes on that side, you'll be all right,” Agnes said.

Lura said, “I couldn't see the rest of the car if I did that.”

“You don't have to see the whole car,” Agnes said. “Can you see the whole car when you're moving
ahead? If you keep it close to the bushes on your side, the other side will take care of itself.”

“I do all right,” Lura said. “Well, I can't use the side mirror, I never have.”

“Lura, it's just easier,” Agnes started to say, but Lura's toe had strayed from the brake pedal and the car's high idle propelled them backwards. Agnes, looking into the mirror on her side, thought for a moment that they would make it clear out of the driveway and into the street by accident, but then Lura realized what was happening and yanked the wheel, and the car jumped the curb and plowed into the bank of azaleas with a paint-rending screech. Lura kept one hand on the gearshift, pulled the stick clank clank into Drive, and the car shot forward into the driveway and jerked to a stop.

“Look at that,” Lura said, disgusted. “Agnes, will you just let me drive?”

In the end, Agnes got out and waited on the sidewalk until Lura had gotten the car into the street. Then she got in and they drove at Lura's steady fifteen-miles-per-hour pace to the pool.

Lura took a couple of spaces near the gate, put the broad straw garden hat back onto her head, and they walked on in.

“Well, here we are,” Lura said. “You go on in. I'll just find somewhere to sit down.”

“I'm going to get some sun before I swim,” Agnes said. “Why don't you sit over there under that awning and get yourself some ice tea? I'll take one of those loungers over there and stretch out.”

“Well, that sounds good,” Lura said. “I don't see how you can stand that sun. I'm glad I wore my hat.
Whew.”
She adjusted the hat and began working her fingers out of the white cotton gloves as she made her way over to the refreshment area.

Agnes walked down to the deck behind the diving boards, spread her Panama City Beach beach towel onto one of the cedar chaise longues, and eased herself down. This was the last time she'd ever go anywhere with Lura. Lord, what an old biddy. She decided not to fool with the suntan lotion. She hoped Lura wouldn't wander off and strand her, or worse yet totter off and fall into the pool and drown. She decided to alert the lifeguard to that possibility. He was a strong-looking boy and very capable, she was sure. She looked at him, sitting up in his high chair, twirling his silver whistle.

She got up and went over to the chair.

“Young man?” she said.

The lifeguard looked down at her. He wore black sunglasses and she couldn't see his eyes.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“Would you keep an eye on that elderly lady over at the refreshment stand? I'm afraid she might wander off and fall into the pool.”

The lifeguard looked down at her for a moment, then over in Lura's direction.

“The lady with the big hat and the sunglasses, ma'am?”

Agnes looked and saw that Lura had pulled out her pair of giant, squared geriatric sunglasses and put them on.

“That's her,” she said.

“Yes'm,” the lifeguard said, “I'll keep an eye on her.”

She looked up at him a moment longer as he put the silver whistle to his lips and blew two short notes, like a songbird's call, and nodded to some action out in the pool. He looked like a Greek god on the mount, like Neptune.

“I thank you,” Agnes said, and went back to her lounge chair. Students from the college lay on their towels along the pool's edge. It was very hot, and every now and then one of the girls got up and stepped down the pool ladder into the water, holding her hair up on top of her head, until the water touched the back of her neck, then climbed out of the water, still holding her hair. Some girls liked to wet their heads, arching their necks back and lowering their long straight hair into the pool. The boys behind their dark glasses watched the girls lower themselves into the pool and emerge with water sparkling on their oiled bodies, then watched them walk to their towels again.

Agnes watched them all. They were all very nearly naked and all brown as the glazed doughnuts Pops used to bring home from Shipley's on Sunday mornings after his early drive to smoke his Sunday cigar. She thought about the students having sex, she knew they all did these days, and wondered if they had to get to know one another before they did it or if they just did it casual as dogs, without a thought. She remembered the taste of the hot soft doughnuts Pops would bring home and it made her so restless she sat up straight in the lounge chair.

Lura was still in the shade at the refreshment stand, fanning herself with a magazine. Agnes got up and eased herself over the pool's edge, let go, and sank to the bottom.

The water sent a great shock of cool through her body. She felt immersed in a great big glass of ice water. She looked around. Everything was green and bright. Way off down at the other end someone dove in and swam across, just thrashing arms and legs. She could see the legs of children dancing around at the shallow end. A cloud sailed over, made all jumpy by the waves. She could see people walk along the pool's edge, their bodies broken into pieces and quivering like Jell-O. The legs and bottom and shoulders and one arm of a girl came slowly down the ladder and slowly climbed back out, jerking like something big outside the water was taking her bite by bite. Agnes felt fine not breathing, as if there was a great supply of air in her lungs. She'd always had wonderful lung capacity. At some point, she thought, it seemed like a body would simply stop needing to take in so much air, stop needing to breathe all the time. Another girl came partially down the ladder, dipped her long hair back into the pool, and then walked back up into the air. Agnes felt as if they all belonged to another world, too thin and insubstantial to sustain her, and the one she was in, her world here deep in the clear green water, was much more pleasurable, much more peaceful. She remembered a dream, swimming in the ocean in a vast school of swift metallic fish, their eyes all around her, the feeling she got eye to eye with the
fishes, and their effortless speed and flashing tails. She felt something stir in her, growing, until she felt filled with it. Her chest ached with it. Saturday nights, Pops would cook their meals. He loved to fry fish. Take Bob out to the lake and get on a bream bed. Pops would come home with a stringer, a mess, wet fish flopping and mouths groping for air. Made her chest ache, watching them. Pops would clean the bream out back, throw Bob a fish head. Bob tossing fish heads around the yard like balls. She was on the brink of a wonderful vision, as if in a moment she would know what Pops had seen as he passed through his own heart and a pile of washed foundry sand into the next world.

She thought she heard the distant trill of a bird and looked up as a crash of bubbles shot down from the surface. The bubbles cleared and she saw it was the lifeguard, his dark and curly hair about his face like a nest of water serpents. His eyes were a clear blue revelation, open wide and upon her. She held out her arms. He came forward and held her and pulled her gently upward. Her hands felt the muscles moving powerfully along his back. She thought that he must have wings, this angel, and he would take her on some beautiful journey.

A
GNES LAY IN HER LAWN CHAIR, WATCHING THE LAST RAYS
of the afternoon sift through tiny gaps between the leaves. The light shifted in an almost kaleidoscopic fashion as the leaves trembled in a breeze that seemed an augury of the evening. She did not fear them,
the passing of the day nor the coming of the evening. She had never felt so relaxed or open to the world around her.

On the way home, Lura's words had been as distant and melodic as a birdsong. The drive had taken only seconds. Lura must have been driving all of thirty-five.

She heard Lura now, as she leaned over Agnes's lawn chair to look at her.

“I imagine you've had enough sun,” Lura said. “You're addled. I'm lucky I'm not dead of a heart attack, you nearly scared me to death.”

Bob ran full-speed in broad circles around the yard just inside the fence. He stopped and stood rigid beside the monkey grass patch beneath the pecan tree, then leaped stiff-legged into the middle of it. He thrashed around and came tearing out of it as if something were after him. A few feet away he stopped, turned around, and barked at it.

“Be quiet, Bob,” Agnes said. Bob looked back at her, as if measuring her authority.

“You ought to let me take you to the doctor, anyway,” Lura said. “You nearly drowned.”

“I was all right.”

“I don't know how you can say that. That boy had to pull you out of the water like an old log.” She touched her hair. “I've left my hat.”