Things Withered (22 page)

“—it’s too fast—” she said.

“Are you going in?” a woman who said her name was Ramona asked. Ramona was in her thirties somewhere. She was in shorts and a t-shirt. The picture on the t-shirt was of a psychedelic swirl with “Sock It to Me!” in bubble letters.

“Cool shirt,” Laura offered. “Is it vintage?”

“Vintage?” Ramona said. She ignored the question. “Are you going in?” She repeated. “I don’t think I’ll go in again,” she added.

On closer inspection, Laura saw that her hair was wet and tangled. A bit of sea plant had worked its way through the tangles. Laura reached up to take it out, but the girl pulled away. “Don’t. It’s okay. I’ll float.”

She was talking to a guy named Kevin about charcoal vs. gas. He was quite handsome, explaining that the only way to cook was with charcoal.

“You get a good hot coal going and the steak is smoky. I’m all about coal. Briquettes. Laura, we’ve all done things we regret.”

“Excuse me?”

“Want to go in the water? Just to the edge. Come on, let’s go,” he said. He reached out as if to put his hand on her arm, but he didn’t. His hand hung in the air.

“What did you say about regrets?”

He smiled, and she noticed that his lips were blue with cold. “Come on, let’s get in there! The water’s beautiful in the dark!” He walked away from her, backwards, to the water, waving his hands playfully,
come on, come on—

She shook her head. The water didn’t look beautiful. It looked vast and dark, the surface as black as the night surrounding them, the moon reflecting a million tiny skeins of light that looked alive, a million tiny snakes slipping under the surf, reappearing somewhere else.

She wandered away when Kevin slipped into the water.

The girl in the sparkly top was beside her then. “I’m going in,” she said. For the first time Laura wondered if she was dreaming. She looked the girl over—she wasn’t wearing anything that seemed water-friendly.

“In that?” Laura giggled. And she noticed the girl was wearing high-heeled shoes. They were really cute.

“Come on—” she said and dashed for the water. “We’re all going in!” Laura watched her run to the edge and then into the water, slipping in up to her knees, almost silently.

Laura moved closer to the water. A lot of people were in there now, more than were left on the beach. She joined a heavy-set woman close to the edge. The water slid gently up on the sand, like a tongue coming out for a lick and then pulling back.

“Hi,” she said. The woman looked up blankly. “There seems to be a lot of kids on the beach tonight,” she said.

The woman answered slowly. “Are there?” Laura looked around in illustration. A pair played in a few inches of lake not four feet away. Deeper in, a little boy was up to his shoulders.

“Seems kind of late.”

“Never too late for a swim,” the woman said. “I’m going now. You should come.”

She walked to the water, and didn’t stop, up to her knees, then the bottom of her black suit, then up to her belly, then her chest. Laura watched her do this, watched until the woman turned back and stared at Laura intently.

Laura was alone on the beach. Everyone was in the water. They all had turned to look at her.

(
seems kinda late for kids
)

“It’s good water,” said the man with the big belly and the cigar. He was still smoking it.

The dog—Rider—jumped in the water near them. Barking. He swam around the attractive couple who were holding hands, knee deep. She could see their mouths moving, but they were just out of hearing distance. If she was a lip reader, she bet she would read
too fast!
on the woman’s lips. There were a few people farther out, bobbing. It all looked so inviting.

From out in the surf a man she didn’t recognize waved. “Laura!” he shouted. “Come on in! Get yourself wet!” He waved again when he caught her eye.

They were all looking at her.

Laura. Laura.

They knew. She looked in their faces and thought they knew all about her, every moment of her life, from how she cried the first day of school to what she wore to prom to the moment she sealed the envelope with the damning photos, to be sent to a woman she did not even know to destroy a family not because she cared but because she was angry.

Kiddo.

“Come on in, Laura—” It was the woman with the black bathing suit. Rider was at her left shoulder, floating in the water, tongue lolling out.

She had to. She could feel the cool sand under her feet, the occasional pebble that hurt. She wasn’t dreaming.

The water was cold and her skin puckered with it immediately, but not in an unpleasant way. Kevin waded in, closer to her. His hair was wet. His arms were wrapped around his middle.

“Deeper,” he said. It seemed, almost, like a dare.

She waded in to her knees and then, the water lapping up over her thighs, she dived. It was smooth and clean-feeling and she wondered how it would feel on her naked breasts. It was good to finally be in the water. She kept her head under for a few strokes of her arms, letting the water rush over her, under her. It was good, clean. Cleansing.

She swam, for want of a better purpose, out to the man who had waved, then stopped, felt around for the bottom and stood. The water was just over her breasts. Her skin had goose-bumped, but the water was warm by then. Nice.

“Hi,” she said to the man. He was a full foot higher in the water than she was.

The man grinned at her.

“Welcome to the water.” he said, and she had just enough time to look confused. They stared. Mouths moved without sound.

Stay.

Her hair clung uncomfortably to her head and neck in great wet clumps. She dipped her head backwards into the water, submerging for the first time, the world around her going silent. Water slipped into her ears, around the soft curves of her face, it slid over her breasts and thighs with the tide and with the motion of her hands. As her eyes closed she could almost remember the way his hands felt on her, the way he would squeeze her thigh and then stick his hand up under her skirt, as if that were foreplay.

It hadn’t even been worth it for that.

Laura opened her eyes to look up at the sky. The night was clear and there were so many stars it looked fake. The moon was so bright, you could see it in every ripple in the water.

It was cold. Her teeth started to chatter.

“I’m so cold—” she said, and turned to her right. The man was gone. She swung her head the other way, and there was no one there. “Hey—” Laura spun herself awkwardly around in the water, treading with her hands, kicking with her feet. Panic rose with confusion. Had she drifted out past the others? All around her was black water, the moon glinting off small waves like winking eyes.

“HEY!” she called. There was no one. She could see the streetlight beyond the path. The beach was deserted. Laura tipped herself forward and began a jerky front crawl in that direction, her arms already tired from treading water. She made little progress, fighting the tide, and rising panic. When she gained a few feet she stopped, and caught her breath.

“Hey!” she tried again. Her own voice echoed back to her from all sides.

The water was so black. Laura leaned into the water again, and tried to swim. Her feet splashed with every kick, the big muscle in her thigh cramping. She barely kept pace with the tide. Her arms weakened, exhausted. Her lungs ached.

Then one kicking foot hit sand. She groaned with relief and stopped, standing on tip toes, her feet digging into the floor of the lake, her head tilted, sucking air into her lungs in great grasping breaths. It was going to be all right.

She pushed herself forward, half-floating, half-walking, ignoring the cold, the ache in her thighs, the sharp sting on her feet from the rocks buried in the sand. When the water was at waist level, she stopped again, to rest.

Laura looked out at the beach, toward the streetlamp for reassurance.

At first, she saw just shadows, backlit by the tall, orangey light. The shadows moved down the path. Light from the moon reached their faces.

Laura waved, and lunged forward through the sandy bottom of the lake. “Hey! Where did—”

They were not the people from the beach. They were old. They struggled on the rock and stared out at the water.

She recognized some of them. The guy from the hot dog stand, Drinks ’n’ Dogs. The old couple on the rocky main beach. The woman from the store, who told her to try the west beach. What had she said.

It’s more of a night beach.

“What’s going on?” she said, close enough to see their expressions. They looked at her oddly. Expectantly.

“It’s okay,” the man from the hot dog place said. “Just close your eyes. It’ll be over fast.”

Laura started to ask
what will be over—

“Gotta do it, sorry to do it. Gotta do it for the town,” the woman said.
Sylvia
, that had been on her smock.

“I don’t understand,” Laura said, but even as she did, even as the panic rose inside her, the line of them, a wall of stone-faced old townies made her stop.
What?

“There’s an undertow,” Sylvia’s husband said. The water under Laura’s feet swelled and retreated, forcing her forward slightly and then pulling her back. First at her ankles, then higher. Calves. She dug her feet in, tried to walk. The water tugged at her thighs, and she stumbled, caught her balance. Her eyes were huge bright circles on her face, lips blue, her mouth a black O open in a scream that echoed back to her over and over.

The water swelled up once more and pulled her under. The last thing she heard was a cascade of voices.

Stay
.

The brown-haired girl waited impatiently in line and was beginning to think twice about the two Cokes and big bag of ketchup chips she was holding, but she had the munchies and then her boyfriend came up behind her and ran his hand over her ass. That made it better. The line moved very slowly to the front of the store.

As they got closer, the young couple looked over the meat case. The roast beef looked good, mouth-wateringly so, and so did the corn beef. He whispered in her ear
get a half-pound of corn beef and I’ll go get some rye bread
and she watched as the big hairy man dragged out a long roll of bologna for someone and started slicing it on the machine.

By the time she got to the counter there were another half-dozen people behind her in line. She told the hairy guy about the corn beef, first ordering roast beef, and then correcting herself with a giggle. The woman behind the till rolled her eyes.

Act straight!
she told herself. She was twenty-one and on her first camping trip without her parents (who would flip if they knew who she was really with).

In an effort to appear older (straight) she said to the woman as she rang up her purchases, “Man! It’s so busy in here! Is it like this all summer?”

The woman tucked the girl’s corn beef and rye into a second bag so the Cokes didn’t crush the bread and said, “Sometimes the summer’s slow in starting. But once the first young person comes, it gets much better. That’ll be $12.50.”

The boyfriend appeared chivalrously from behind and gave the woman a twenty.

“Looks like you could use some help,” he said.

“We had some,” the woman said and gave him the bags. “Watch while you’re swimming. There’s an undertow.”

There were two dogs, and without a drink Dass had trouble remembering their names. His mind was jumpy when he hadn’t had a drink. He’d no sooner be trying to remember the name of the black-one-with-the-white-tip (on his tail), than he’d be figuring out a way to get some money. Then he’d be thinking of who he owed money to, and how unlikely it was he would ever pay it back, and then he’d be thinking about all of the places he’d have to avoid going, in order to avoid running into those people, and because some of those places were BARS he’d be thinking about how to get a drink.

But the dogs were important today. He had to take them away. Marnie was going to dry out. She wouldn’t go unless someone took care of the dogs (Beachie? Bitchie? Barbie?). He told her he’d take care of it. Just as soon as he could.

She was going off in a cab, but she wanted to see him go with the dogs first.

She had cab money. And him with no drinking money.

“You’re not taking them to kill them, are you?” Marnie looked bad. Drink bad. Her hands were shaking so hard she had to take three tries at the lipstick.

“No no no,” he said, thinking about the cab money (in her purse, maybe). He wanted so badly to ask her for a couple of bucks for the dogs, you know, but she’d see right through that, and she’d know it would be drunk up by noon. (Sooner, but then without the cab money she would have to take the bus, or get on the horn and start calling around their bum friends for a ride and that might be bad news, bad bad news cause you can’t control the car unless you’re driving and there were people who’d just as soon drive her right down to Andy’s Bar, down the street aways and Marnie was shaking bad enough to say okay; so it would be noon at the soonest.)

The dogs were barking at someone going by. They were always barking. It was a busy street, lots of people home during the day. Dass had fixed the gate up a few weeks earlier (and was damn proud of that work, four nails and a piece of board from the alley, but damn proud just the same—most days just finding the hammer would have been cause for celebration). Course, he’d been drinking that day. Pay day. That was why they had the front door open and the dogs running all over the street. People kept coming over and taking off, leaving the door open. Dogs kept getting out. Barking, scaring the little kid across the street. Kid was bit by a dog when he was barely walking. Scared since, the kid’s mom told Dass, all the while angling for a beer.

Dogs liked being outside. Dass left Marnie in the bathroom and he opened the door. They barrelled out past him, the big one (yellow dog) knocking him into the front door. It bounced against the wall and popped him back.

He would’ve liked a drink.

Sun was out. No snow yet, but coming. Winter was such a stupid, evil bitch, dangerous like acid when a man had to remember his coat and boots and gloves when often he couldn’t remember the names of his wife’s dogs.

“What the hell’s the big one’s name,” Dass called into the bathroom.

“Digger?”

Digger. How the fuckin’ hell was he supposed to remember Digger? Especially since he was already Yellow Dog in his mind.

Marnie came out of the bathroom tucking her shirt into her jeans. Her lipstick was more or less straight and she’d combed her hair and pulled it back in a tail. She looked not bad except for the scary look in her eye and he nodded as much to her.

“You’re not going to party while I’m gone, are you Dass?’

He groaned and looked away from her, watching the dogs bark and run along the fence at someone walking by. “No,” he said into the window. “With what? My good looks?”

You go get straight at a hospital and I’ll just get straight here on my own. Nice fuckin’ world.

“And you’re going to take the dogs somewhere nice?” He grunted again. She knew fuck all. “You know you can’t take care of those dogs on your own.”

Then like a cat or something she was right up behind him, her shaky hands on his back. He shook her off. “I’m feeling awful low, Dass. Scared and low.”

“Maybe you should take an ambulance,” he said. Deferred cost.

“I got my cab money. Is it out there? Did you call it?”

“You get anything else from His Almighty?” She tapped him lightly on the back. He had a feeling that she might have liked to give him a good sock with her fist, but she wasn’t feeling up to that.

“You know I don’t. You know I’d give you,” she said. “I’m sorry. You got any cigarettes?”

“No. You think the bastard would spring for a nice breakfast for you.”

Behind him, Marnie restlessly went through things, looking. Looking for cigarettes, looking for money, looking for booze, just looking. There was nowhere new to look. They both did it, all the time. It was their way of pacing.

“No fucking cigarettes,” she said. “Nice goodbye.” Then she started crying.

The cab came late, reluctant. The driver sat in the car and honked for her. She took her little shopping bag with a change of clothes and her cab money (or maybe it was tucked in her shoe; to his credit, it wasn’t like Dass had really, really looked) and waved from the cab. She looked scared and sick. He waved her off and realized he forgot to ask the other dog’s name.

By noon Dass was shaking pretty bad. He ran a hand over his wobbling chin a few times, ignoring the beard that was now growing there, no longer just stubble, and did his pacing. He peeked in vases, in drawers, under the rug, pulled the cushions off the sofa, checked inside the zippered sides of the cushions, under the back, under the sofa, under the rug again. The looking itself became a huge distraction, an activity so filled with futile hope that it completely, happily occupied him. He poked in emptied ashtrays, went through Marnie’s underwear drawer, in the chocolate box she kept her jewellery in, looked in the medicine chest, in the cutlery drawer, on top of the fridge, gave all the empty beer bottles a shake looking for a sip of something.

He did every room probably twice.

The dogs barked, more lazily by noon. They ate the dried crumbs in their bowls and slurped water from the toilet, and did their own version of the pace. They nosed under the usual places for bits of forgotten food, not realizing or not having to, that they’d been all those places already.

Maybe he could get money for them.

If he had to take care of them anyway he might as well see.

Marnie was damn attached to her dogs.

Shaking bad and feeling sick by one, Dass found a length of rope in the back shed and tied it to the collar of Yellow Dog. He did no better than clothesline for the other one, the black-one-with-the-white-tip (on his tail) and tied it with a half-knot to the collar. It slipped off a couple of times anyway, and he finally just tied the line around the animal’s neck and hoped for the best.

The Humane Society was a good twenty blocks from their place.

Marnie’d be eating some kind of lunch by then, he thought. Drying out for two weeks. Shots of stuff, probably to take away the worst of it. Food, bed, heat, people to talk to (about not drinking). Nothing to drink. It was a real toss-up.

Nothing to drink was harsh thinking.

Marnie was attached to those dogs. It was unnatural. They were there before him, even. He could remember (slightly) Yellow Dog sniffing around him. He poured a little beer into a dish for the dog as a way to impress Marnie. They’d laughed like hell when he slurped it up. He wished he had that now. That was the thing about drinks you gave away, you never got them back, and the glow of the generosity faded fast.

“Get some chow, hey boys?” Dass told the dogs periodically. It was cold out, and he tugged the zipper on his jacket all the way to the top. His nose was freezing. He held both leads in one hand and kept the other tucked in his pocket. Without thinking about it, he would do a search once in a while for loose change, through all the pockets. It was comforting, and unconscious.

The dogs pulled him along. Get some chow.

All the months they’d been together, some real bad ones (which was why her brother was sending her off to dry out, nothing to drink, ha ha Marnie, who’s your daddy now?) she always fed those animals. She’d scrape up the cash and buy goddamn dog food. Dass had almost hit her once over it, when they were first together, but he never did, of course. He’d never hit a woman. But (in recent memory) that was the closest he’d come.

Sweating with the bad sick, the need-a-goddamn-drink sick, trembling, eyes watering against the cold, smelling in clothes unwashed and unchanged for a while, he pulled the dogs across the street and ignored the people ignoring him from the bus stop with wary eyes.

It was unnatural, the way she was attached to the dogs.

Besides, they could get them back. Wasn’t that what the Humane Society did? Wasn’t it like a pawn shop, but for dogs. And cats.

The christly things slept with them, for bloody sake. Leaving their dog hairs everywhere. They’d get inside your clothes and itch like the dickens. Get in the food. Eat you out of house and home.

They could get them back in a couple of weeks. Who the hell would want to buy a couple of mangy mutts that barked at every living thing? He’d get some money for them and then have them back lickety-split, before Marnie even knew they’d been gone.

“Get some chow,” he muttered, halfway to the dogs.

Dass took the two dogs into the low-bricked building with the small painted sign that didn’t exactly scream money, but looked just sleazy enough to remind him of a pawn shop. The door pulled cold air in with him and for a minute all he could smell was dog. It wiped out completely the smell of his own sick-sweat. It was comforting. Homey, even.

Grey hair stuck out over both ears over a fat, florid neck, with the zipper of his brown windbreaker jammed up into it. There was a fresh scab over a long, terrible looking scratch on the top of his bald head and a sore that hadn’t quite been healing on his cheek. The two ladies behind the counter looked up when he came in, first at the two barking dogs, and then at him.

That is what they saw.

He saw them see, and he tugged up his pants, self-consciously. He smiled at them, brown teeth poking through grey lips.

“Hi,” he said, and was suddenly uncertain as to how to go about it.

The dogs barked.

“Shuddup,” he snapped at them.

“Can I help you?” one of the women said.

She stood back from counter, hardly glancing at the dogs and asked the man what he wanted them to do with them.

Dass tried to explain in a roundabout way about Marnie and her “trip,” saying she was going out of town (out of this world, off the planet) for a while and couldn’t take care of the dogs. He explained for a good five minutes, wrapping words around lies and forgetting which he’d told, truth or lies. He thought at one point he might have said something (thinking he was needing something extra there and not quite being able to put his finger on compassion but remembering something dimly like it, and remarking that Marnie loved those dogs and then calling her poor Marnie and maybe—he hoped not for reasons he also couldn’t quite reach—saying something about her giving up the bottle).

“You want us to kennel these dogs?” the woman said. She said dogs like she meant shoes.

Dass was confused. He didn’t think that was what he wanted. (What he wanted was a drink). He thought he’d explained it. Apparently he hadn’t, and he launched in self-defence into another explanation of Marnie and her love for the dogs and his own inability to care for them. And hit upon what he thought might be the right thing to say.

“Gotta work, you know.”

The woman tired and reached under the counter pulling out a long sheet of paper with endless official questions.

“You’re surrendering the dogs to the Humane Society, is that right?” she asked without waiting for his answer. She spun the form around so its right side faced Dass. She put a Bic pen on top of the paper.

“Fill out as much of the form as possible—” she said, and turned to the other woman, who throughout the exchange had simply leaned on the counter and watched. She said something to her that Dass didn’t quite catch. He stared at the form.

Name, address, the usual shit. He picked up the pen. His hand was shaking very badly by then and he was thinking he was doing a very bad (bad dog thing) thing and no one had yet mentioned money.

His throat was dry. He needed a drink. Couldn’t think without a drink. Couldn’t fill out the form without a drink. He wished suddenly that he was just home, throwing up into the can, getting on the horn, finding someone with some money. Taking beer bottles in. Looking for beer bottles in the parking lot behind the hotel. Anything. He wished he’d said he’d found the dogs. (Wished he hadn’t mentioned Marnie, wished she didn’t trust him with the goddamn dogs whose names he couldn’t even—)

“This one’s Ginger,” he said, suddenly. Shook his head. “Digger. Name’s Digger. He’s a good dog,” he added, and petted the head. The other woman was coming around the counter to take them.

Tucker.

“The little one’s Tucker,” he said. Thought. Tucker. That was it; they called him Fucker when they were happy and drinking.

Marnie. Poor Marnie.

The form sat unfilled on the counter and the woman was holding her hand out for the leads. Dass hesitated.

“Um,” he managed.

The two women waited.

“What about some money?” he said, and licked his lips feeling bad about that, but unable to help himself, the need and the dryness and the looking women making him do it.

“It’s ten dollars a dog,” the woman behind the counter said. Dass relaxed visibly, his heart rising in his throat. (Twenty dollars! twenty dollars! lunch too!)

“It’s an administration fee,” she said efficiently. The other woman took the clothesline and the yellow nylon rope from Dass’s hand even as the words started to work inside his head, even before he became utterly crestfallen even before he had a chance to discard it immediately they don’t mean that.

“We’ll need cash or cheque—with proper identification, of course—we don’t have debit or credit card.” the woman said.