Last Days of the Dog-Men (6 page)

“Lura, just sit down and be quiet or go home. I'm feeling so peaceful.”

“You've had a near-death experience,” Lura said.

“Oh, be quiet,” Agnes said. Lura touched her hair again, started to say something, then sat down in a
lawn chair, and Agnes again turned her attention to the sunset coloring the light behind the trees. The light deepened and the breeze ran through the leaves like the passing of a gentle hand. Agnes didn't know when she had felt so much at peace. It had not been her time to go. But she had been close enough to see into that moment, and she did not dislike what she had seen.

The bank of orange clouds behind and above the treeline began to fade into slate against the deepening blue of the sky. The loud and raucous birds of the day had retreated, and the quiet of evening began to settle in. The light faded measurably, moment by moment. It was so beautiful she did not think she was not seeing it with two eyes. She heard Bob and looked for him against the purpling green of the lawn and the shrubbery. He'd begun again his racing around and around. He'd worn a narrow path in the grass, a perfect oval like a racetrack. She found him, a speeding, blurred ball of black and white led by a wild and wide-open eye, and watched as he zipped past and approached the far fence. And then, in violation of what had seemed a perfect order, he suddenly leaped. He leaped amazingly high, and with great velocity. He leaped, as if launched by a giant invisible spring in the grass, or shot from a circus cannon, and sailed over the fence into the gathering darkness.

“My goodness,” Lura said.

Agnes was stunned. In the empty space where a few seconds ago Bob had been pure energy in motion, had sped like a comet in his orbit, everything was still.

“Are you going to go get him?” Lura said.

After a moment Agnes said, “I imagine so,” thinking, Now why did he have to go and do that, but not really feeling all that disturbed, as if nothing could very much disturb her peace.

“You want me to drive you?”

“No,” Agnes said. “He won't go far.”

“It's getting dark.”

“I can see in the dark as well as anyone.”

“Well, I didn't mean anything. I just thought I'd offer to help.”

“Go on home and get some rest, Lura. You've been through enough for one day.”

She left Lura in the yard and went inside to pull on a pair of slacks and a blouse. She hesitated, then from the kitchen beside the refrigerator she got the nightstick Pops always used to carry in his car. She tapped it into her palm. “Damn old dog,” she said.

She walked all the way down the street to the thoroughfare, calling, then crossed and turned into an older neighborhood with houses hidden in big heavy-limbed trees. The sidewalk was made of old buckled bricks. Dead downtown was a few blocks away, the air above it all blue and foggy with streetlamp glow. It looked underwater. She picked her way along the uneven brick path, the dry sound of roaches scurrying away from her flip-flops.

The old trees towering over her head were so thick with leaves they were spooky. Agnes harked back to fairy tales heard in her childhood and imagined that she was a child walking in a forest where someone had long ago cut the narrow rumbly streets along old trails.
Big roots hunched up through the crumbly pavement, and here and there a cozy house was nestled deep in amongst the trees like a forest cottage.

She and Pops were married forty-nine years. Sometimes it seemed like the whole thing actually took place, and then sometimes it didn't, as if there was a big blank between when she was a little girl and now. She was only twenty-one when they married. She remembered their honeymoon at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear. They'd walked those old paths draped with that moss like damp shadowy lace. In the room their love was quick and startling, their bodies drawn into it like a child's arm drawn briefly into a hard and painful little muscle.

Agnes slowed her steps as her heart sped up. She remembered kissing Pops in the late years and how it was just pinched-up lips and a dry peck, and remembered kissing him like that in his box, how his lips were like wood and how horrified she'd been. She'd had that craving for a child, briefly, a little bit late, and had not pressed it with Pops. He'd not had word one on the subject. He seemed at times such a passive man, and then at others all pent up. If he'd had passions, she suspected he disapproved of their expression. Perhaps he told them to Bob in the intimacy between a man and his dog, who knows what a man told his dog? He'd always had Bob. There were two other dogs before him, but they were the same kind of dog, looked exactly the same. Every one named Bob. She wondered if he'd have done the same with her if she'd died, just gone out and got another Agnes. If there hadn't been Bob, maybe he'd have talked to her.
Seemed like they had the same dog for forty-nine years. One would die, Pops would get another one just like it the next day. Seemed to have the same obnoxious personality. She'd sometimes catch herself looking at that dog, or one of them, and thinking, This is the longest-living dog I ever saw. She laughed out loud.

She rounded a comer and looked down a narrow street lighted dimly by the old streetlamps. Far down, a little dog stood still in the middle of the road. From what Agnes could make out, it looked like Bob. He seemed to be looking back at her.

She leaned forward, squinting her good eye.

The dog stood very still, looking at her.

“Bob,” Agnes said. Then she called out, “Bob! Come here, boy! Oh Bob!”

She moved a little closer. Bob tensed up, stiffened his legs and his neck. Otherwise, he didn't budge.

Agnes clucked to herself and tapped the nightstick into her palm. “Damn old dog. I ought to let him run off somewhere.

“Go on!” she called to him then. “Go on, if you want to.”

Bob took a little straightening step. He lifted his head and sniffed the breeze. He was poised there, under the streetlamp, looking proud and aloof, seeming in that foggy distance like the ghost of all the Bobs. She imagined that after fifty years he was asking himself if he wanted any more. Well, she thought, she wouldn't press it: she would let him go where he wanted to go.

She heard a car and looked around. There at the stop sign sat Lura's Impala, like some big pale fish paused on the ocean floor, the headlights its soft glowing eyes seeking. It nosed around the comer headed her way. At that Bob turned and trotted away. She watched him fade into the foggy gloom, just the hint of a sidling slip in his gait. Go on and look around then, she said to herself. Go see what you've been sniffing in the breeze. She couldn't see him then, his image snuffed in the fog.

She stood in the middle of the old quiet street and waited on Lura to pull up. On a lark she turned sideways and stuck out her thumb. The car eased up beside her. She opened the creaky old door and looked in. Lura appeared to be dressed for traveling.

“I got an idea,” Agnes said.

At Lura's pace they reached the coast about dawn. They took the long winding road out to the fort, hung a left at the guardhouse, and went down to the beach. Lura, woozy with fatigue, rolled on off the blacktop and into the sand for several yards before the Impala bogged down. She took the gearshift in one white-gloved hand and pushed it up into Park, pushed the headlights knob to the dash, and shut off the engine. Gulls and wader birds called across the marsh. The sky was lightening into blue. Frogs and more birds began to call, and redwings clung to stalks of swaying sea oats.

“Listen to the morning,” Lura said.

And Agnes closed both eyes to sleep as the molten sun boiled up, cyclopic, from the water.

A BLESSING

T
HAT AFTERNOON HER HUSBAND DROVE THEM OUT
the old Birmingham highway in the wagon, a 1985 Ford LTD Country Squire he'd bought on a lark in these, the latter days of what she called her great gestation. It was a big, safe car. He drove slowly as always, taking it easy, never straining the wagon's enormous transmission. The car sailed over humps in the road like a yacht over swells in the ocean, and plowed into low-lying dips with a grave and leveling balanced distribution of load.

They sat on the broad front seat as small as children, as if their feet weren't actually touching the floor. The car's long, broad interior even made
her
feel small, with her swollen middle and engorged, stretch-marked, leaky sacs—once girlish breasts she could cup
in her palms. Sitting there, she felt like a penitent, pregnant twelve-year-old on an outing with her dad.

After a few miles her husband turned on the wagon's left blinker, looked in the rearview mirror, checked once over his left shoulder, and turned, releasing a convoy of impatient vehicles gathered behind him. In her visor's vanity mirror she caught flashes of the angry faces of drivers who watched the Ford mosey off down the little blacktop road.

It was getting toward late afternoon, the sun dropping in the sky and yellowing in the haze. On the left appeared a lush, rolling pasture where two piebald horses grazed in the shade of a grove and flicked their tails at horseflies.

“Oh, look,” she said. “Pintos. Let's stop, just for a minute.” She'd ridden horses as a girl, and hoped she would again someday, with their child. Her husband eased the wagon onto the shoulder and came around to help her get out. He held her by the arm while she steadied her legs and rolled her weight from the ball of one swollen foot to another, over to the barbed-wire fence. The wire was rusty. They didn't touch it or try to cross it into the pasture. He whistled a couple of times for the ponies, who looked up from grazing to gaze at them briefly. The smaller one toggled its ears in their direction, and then both bent back down to the sweet-looking grass.

“I wish we had an apple or something,” she said.

“We'd better get on,” he said. “We'll be late.”

She lingered a moment. “It's a good omen,” she said, “seeing the ponies.”

Omens weren't as important to him as to her, she knew, but he was not unaffected by them. Once, after a breakup, she saw an early star right next to the moon, which was full and distinct as a white communion wafer she might reach up, take, and place upon her tongue. She hadn't taken communion since she was a girl. It had been a very good sign.

He helped her back to the car, and they drove on down the road to a T intersection, where he turned right onto a bumpy lane pocked with potholes and ragged on the edges, as if it had been ripped from the middle of a better road and patched with surplus asphalt. The car jolted and rattled over a washed-out stretch. He slowed even more and looked over at her. She put both hands on her middle as if to steady it.

“I'm okay,” she said, patting herself. “Good shocks.”

They descended into a wooded ravine and crossed a small bridge over a creek. The water rushed beneath them over what looked like slate and plunged into a lower cut off to their left, disappearing into the thick, intertwined foliage of the woods. She wondered at what sort of wildlife crept in there, what strange small animals. Manimals, she'd called animals when she was a toddler. She'd had a sonogram a couple of months back, and was awed and a little frightened by the baby's alien image on the screen, its wide dark eye sockets and oddly reptilian attitude in the womb. In some ways it was like the grainy, negative image of a nightmare, and yet she felt a profound and overwhelming love the moment she saw it. She was superstitious,
she knew, because she had a vulnerable imagination.

The car rose, like an airliner groaning into flight, up the steep other side of the ravine. At the top of the hill he turned right again, onto a hard-packed dirt-and-gravel road that wound into the woods, climbed, and ended in a clearing on top of a knoll from which two narrow drives dropped away.

“I think we take the left one here,” her husband said. The drive he indicated, half the width of the dirt-and-gravel road, seemed to lead off into the air at the treetop level of broadleafs that grew down in the canyon. He eased the wagon up to the edge and they peered over it, where they saw a steep and rutted drive that curved sharply at the bottom into a clearing. Through the trees they could see part of a house and beyond that the slanting late-afternoon light glinting on water.

“There must be lakes all through these old canyons,” he said. “I wouldn't mind living out here.”

The wagon's engine idled alternately high and low, adjusting to the condenser cycling on and off. He turned off the air and rolled down every window in the car, using the control panel on his armrest, then turned off the car. The engine ticked like a conductor's baton upon the music stand, the silence of the woods settled into their ears, and they began to hear the desultory drone of insects, the oddly loud, staccato songs of birds, and some low sound they couldn't distinguish: water, a breeze in the trees, or both.

“It's so quiet.”

“I could get used to it,” he said.

“Be careful with this dog, okay?”

“I will. I won't get out if it doesn't look right.”

“Okay,” she said.

“We don't have to get another dog right now, if you don't want to. It's not really important.”

“No, it's all right. I know you miss Rowdy.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I miss him.”

“I just want to make sure this dog's—I don't know—good-natured.”

“He's got a hard act to follow.”

“I know. Rowdy was the best.”

“Yep,” he said. “He was.”

They peered again over the edge of the drive. The car was perched just there.

“Well,” he said, “we'd better get on.”

He didn't crank the car again, but merely turned the ignition switch to On, dropped the gearshift to Neutral, and allowed the wagon to roll slowly off the knoll and down the narrow drive. It was steep and rutted with erosion, most of its gravel had washed away. The experience was like a slow-motion bronco ride. They were pressed forward into their seat belts and shoulder straps so that her arms actually hung forward toward the dash. She felt a faint, quick wave of nausea and almost wished she hadn't come along.