The Used World (33 page)

“Why anything with Hazel,” Millie answered.

There was a transfer of leather at the back of Hazel’s car, and then Rebekah was being dragged forward, right toward the front door, by a massive-chested, red-nosed, ear-disfigured…
“Bandit?”
Claudia said, stepping out the front door and closing it behind her.

“Look what I’ve got!” Rebekah said happily, although her right shoulder seemed in danger of being dislocated. The dog changed course and headed down the driveway.

“Bandit?”
Claudia said, staring at Hazel, who refused to meet her eye.

“He is
strong,
” Rebekah said as she disappeared behind Millie’s car.

“It’s a she,” Hazel said, still not looking at Claudia. “Merry Christmas!”

The front door opened and there was Millie, now without Oliver, her hands on her hips and an expression on her face like an old fisherwoman. “Is that some kind of pig? What is that? Is that a pig on a leash, Hazel?”

“Millie,” Hazel said, giving her a wave. “Always lovely to see you.”

“Why did you bring that dog?” Millie asked.

“Yes, Hazel. Why did you bring that dog?” Claudia took a step forward so that Hazel had to look up at her.

“It’s sort of a story. Can we go inside?”

“You’re not bringing that dog inside,” Millie said, shaking her head, as Rebekah was being towed across the yard toward the door.

“Why not?” Hazel asked, now putting her fists on her own hips. “What’s it to you?”

“Well, if I am not mistaken, that is some sort of pit bull, Hazel Hunnicutt, and there is a baby in this house.”

“Oh, oh, how silly of me. She’s a pit bull, so let’s just smear Oliver with condiments and tuck him in a bun.”

“Excuse me,” Rebekah said as Bandit pulled her past Millie and into the house.

“You can’t pretend I’m wrong, Hazel, I read the news.”

“You do? Then who is the Majority Whip?”

Claudia cleared her throat. “What I’d like to know is—”

From inside the house Rebekah yelled, “Claudia! Come quick!”

Claudia ran past Millie, terrified that now, of all times, Millie would be right about something and little Oliver would be missing an arm. What she found was Oliver in his swing, laughing madly and turning his head back and forth against the swing’s seat as Bandit licked him with a tongue the length of an ironing board. Oliver was laughing harder than Claudia had ever heard him, a deep, physical sound that carried in it a premonition of the boy he would be.

“Look at this! It’s like they know each other,” Rebekah said, her face flushed.

“They…” Claudia swallowed, barely able to speak. “They do.” Hazel, too, must have felt how sad it was, that this was what Oliver had—not parents or photographs, no baby book or engraved silver cup, no one guarding the story of his birth and first year as if it had been the Nativity. He had this mangy, scarred, brutalized animal, his companion in the kitchen at Cobb Creek.

“I can’t tell you how I disapprove of this,” Millie said, sharpening all of her angles.

“I went out there, you know, Claudia,” Hazel began.

Claudia looked at her and saw it on her face, the wet cold, the garbage, the empty plastic chair facing the psychedelic poster on the wall. How would she ever tell Oliver the truth? Where would she say he had come from? “And?”

“And mostly everyone is gone. There were a couple people asleep in the living room. There has been some…attrition among the pets.”

“I see.”

“The pups are gone, and Bandit was chained to a radiator in a back room. You can see that she’s gone a bit thin.” Hazel’s words were clipped, her tone aimed not at Millie but at Claudia alone; she was trying to tell a story by leaving all of the details out.

Bandit was certainly thin. She seemed to have lost muscle mass over her spine, and her hips were rising up, as clearly defined as an anatomical model’s. More alarming were the calluses over her elbows, as if the skin had thickened to keep the bones from breaking through.

“I couldn’t leave her there.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” Rebekah said, bending down and pulling Bandit away from Oliver’s swing by a thick, stained collar.

“I stopped at the store and got fifty pounds of dog food, bowls, this leash.”

Claudia gave Hazel her most level look. There was nothing, really, to say: she couldn’t have left the dog there to die. And what came next, that Hazel couldn’t take her home because of the cats, was also true.

“I’m wondering…”

“You should leave her here with us, shouldn’t she, Claudia? Couldn’t we keep her for a while, just until Hazel figures something else out? I’ve never, I was never allowed to have a dog at home—”

“You
cannot
have that dog here, Claudia, around the baby. It looks like a disease on legs. It will destroy the house and—”

“I think,” Hazel said, “and of course you’re welcome to disagree, but I think this is really the best place for her. Claudia, look at me.”

But she didn’t need to look at her; Claudia didn’t need to have her fate outlined and read aloud. What Hazel wanted didn’t matter; what Millie said was irrelevant. That Rebekah wanted the dog was a point on the ledger. The only vote that counted, at least today, was Oliver’s. His new swing moved forward and back with a soft ticking sound and he himself was still, his eyes fixed on that battered, cinder-block head. Bandit watched him, too, her mouth opened all the way back to where her ears would have been, her eyes as clear as bottle glass. The dog and the baby studied each other as if the war had ended and a noble country had offered them repatriation. It would be exhausting, and she might live to regret it, but Claudia was that country. She blinked, let out the breath she’d been holding, then walked out to Hazel’s car to bring in the food, the bowls, another bed.

1970

She awakened every Christmas morning to gifts she did not need and smiled politely, thanking her parents, telling them again—as she had the year before—that the sweater was just the right color and size, the scarf would look lovely with her new coat. Later in the day her mother would find occasion to sneak up to Hazel’s room with a stack of new hardcover books, each one wrapped in accordance with its gravity or mirth. Caroline had no time for fiction and she was a society unto herself; Hazel, too, stood guarded and apart, so that the books on the bed in their gold foil and sprigs of mistletoe were like smoke signals sent across a mountain range, between neighbors so distant they could not see one another at all.

Hazel and her mother worked together in the silence of complicity, together as a sort of corporation, and for Albert when their own work was slow. And it often was—sometimes weeks would go by without the frantic phone call or the veiled letter from A Friend. There were trends, if Hazel would take the time to see them. Of course they were cosmological: as above, so below. The heavens moved, the oceans boiled, and tectonic plates ground against each other. She didn’t chart the events, but someday she might, she told herself, seeing the possibility of a life’s work: a hypothesis that would marry the Ephemera with medical records, final proof that the universe was Female and sick of Her condition. Something was waiting there, in that idea, but Hazel never looked directly at it; she only glanced.

And in the afternoon of Christmas Day—for how long now? for as long as she could recall—she would go to Finney’s house to exchange gifts with her. There was more pleasure in one of those afternoons than in all the Christmases with Hazel’s own family combined. Hazel delighted in watching Malcolm fall asleep after dinner, tipped back in his recliner in front of the television: just that. A man who could be sated by nothing more than turkey and the gift of new socks. Janey bustled around the clean kitchen in an apron, usually in her battered house slippers, baking Christmas cakes that sometimes fell. What a treasure they were, these people for whom cakes collapsed, sleepy, normal people who worked hard and loved their daughter, and knew how to take a holiday off and spend it. They
spent
Christmas Day, like a bonus check or a tax return, while at the sterile Hunnicutt Clinic shoes were always worn; sleeping was a private activity conducted only at night, in a bedroom; and everything was hoarded—money and joy alike.

Last year and this year were different, and Hazel mourned the change even as she was driving toward it. At four o’clock the day was near fully dark, and Hazel was heading not in the direction of Malcolm and Janey’s farm, where she had spent so much of her life, but toward Jonah. Hazel pictured the farm and it was summer there. She and Finney were driving a tractor back to the farthest southern lot to check on a mare and her colt. Or it was evening and the four of them were in the family room watching television, eating pizza off paper plates. Three cats from the ever-changing population were there with them, sitting on the back of the couch. Or there was a snowstorm, and Malcolm had just come in from the barn, saying, “The lights are out from Dan to Bathsheba,” which Hazel knew meant a long, long way.

The gate to the front yard at Finney’s farmhouse was crooked and wild roses grew up on either side of it in the spring. Janey had once owned a rabbit named Persnickety. Malcolm had, in 1957, hit and killed a silver fox and never forgiven himself. Hazel drove on Christmas Day, tried to quantify how much she knew of them, how much she remembered, but there was no end to it. Recalling Finney’s life, Finney’s family, was easier than recalling her own.

She drove past the high school and through the downtown; crossed the river and wandered through back streets to the mill houses along the railroad tracks and close to the grain elevator—the neighborhood known locally as Shack Town. Jim Hank had grown up here, but had saved his money and gotten out when his father finally died from drinking. Jim lived downtown now, in a small apartment above a shop that sold sewing machines.

In this light the houses were an indistinguishable gray; most seemed to have no paint left at all. There were no driveways here, or garages—just yards in which snow-covered, hobbled old trucks rested on blocks, and children’s bicycles had been left to rust. The scene was even more dispiriting come spring, when the disguise of snow was gone and the mud and ruts were revealed. There were dogs, too, Hazel knew, shivering now in dark doghouses. In spring they appeared, dragging tow chains so heavy they sometimes became embedded in the dogs’ necks.

This. This was where she now lived, the tall, graceful, starry-eyed skating girl, Finney.

Hazel walked with care up the precarious front steps, which canted to the left and were slick with mud and ice. The yellow bulb in the outside socket lent the porch a jaundiced air. Through the cheap, gauzy curtains in the front windows Hazel saw Finney’s shadow move between two doorways in the center of the house, but when Hazel knocked, Finney was right there, waiting.

“Come in! Come in, Hazey May, and Merry Christmas.” Finney kissed Hazel on the cheek, squeezed her hands.

“Are you expecting company?” On the small dining room table were two glasses, and an open bottle of wine.

“Just you, nutty girl.” Finney took Hazel’s coat and scarf, draped them over the arm of the sofa, a faded blue monstrosity with scarred wooden arms.

Hazel tried, as she had tried for the past eighteen months, not to look too closely at the home Finney had chosen for herself, for which she would forgo the comfort of the farm and her parents. It was right—she knew this—for Finney to leave home, no matter where she ended up, much more right than Hazel’s decision to stay put. But the reason Finney moved when she did stuck in Hazel’s throat like a bone; she couldn’t get past it.

She had to hand it to Finney—she’d worked at the place gamely. There were brightly colored pillows on the cast-off sofa and chair in the living room, and scarves draped over the two lamps. She was going for a gypsy look, and had achieved it, as gypsies undoubtedly loved nice things as much as anyone else, and made do with what they had. It wasn’t the decor that bothered Hazel, it was that Finney had chosen an atmosphere so shopworn and desperate. Shack Town was the end for most everyone who lived there, it was the dank bottom of the barrel. Finney was surrounded by alcoholics, by women in their twenties who’d already lost most of their teeth to their fathers’ pliers. The children were hollow-eyed and prone to violence. Finney could have chosen a hundred different places, all of them an improvement, but she knew only one place where no one, not one soul, cared what her neighbor was doing.

“Sit down, let me pour you some wine.” Finney gestured to the Formica table, and a metal chair with a bright yellow cushion.

“It’s four in the afternoon,” Hazel reminded her.

“But it’s
Christmas.
”

“Fair enough.”

Finney’s hair was still cut in her signature style, but it no longer shone as it once had. She spent four mornings a week at the 10th Street Diner, serving up eggs and coffee and red-eye gravy in a fog of cigarette smoke and grease. It was all she could do, she’d once told Hazel, to get the smell off before she went to her regular job at Sterling’s. Some of the women she worked with gave her disquieting looks when she passed, though no one said anything outright.

“It’s Mogen David,” Finney said, pouring. “Not what Caroline would serve, I’m sure.”