When he opened the truck’s door and the dome light came on, the scene that presented itself shouldn’t have surprised him but still did. Rub, having backed up against the passenger-side door as far as he could, now stood quaking with fear, his canine knees knocking together like a cartoon dog’s. A small drop of urine glistened at the tip of his bright red penis, presumably the very last drop in the entire dog. The seat was soaked, as were the dash and steering wheel and even the windshield. Sully turned on the wipers to confirm that the moisture was on the inside, and it was. “Rub,” he said quietly, in case he was wrong about the dog being empty. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Then there it was again, nearby, that same goddamn mewling. He thought about going back to the house to alert Bootsie that something sick or injured, probably a raccoon, had crawled under the house. Maybe Rub had seen or sensed it there and that’s what had driven him batshit in the truck. But then the porch light went out and the mewling stopped, so Sully decided to let it go. The other Rub was probably at the Horse already, waiting for him to show up, and he’d mention it to him then. Tomorrow, after they’d taken care of the tree branch, they could shine a flashlight under the porch and see what had taken up residence there. From where he sat, his keys dangling in the ignition, Sully could just make out the shape of the branch where it lay on the ground. Odd that Rub hadn’t sectioned the fallen limb, a five-minute job, tops. Had the chain saw fritzed? Was that why he left it sitting out in the open for someone to steal? Rub wasn’t normally careless with tools.
On the other hand, life was full of mysteries, none more perplexing than human nature itself. His conversation with Bootsie, on top of the earlier one with Ruth, had left him feeling both exhausted and useless. Maybe Ruth was right and he should find a beach somewhere. He’d always wanted to, at least back when he couldn’t afford it. Why not go someplace now, when he could? Tonight, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to drive out to the Horse, though he knew he would. Turning the key, he put the truck in reverse and backed out. When the headlights swept over the felled branch, Sully imagined, for some reason, that Rub was lying dead beneath it, which would account not only for his absence but also the fact that he hadn’t finished the job. This morbid scenario dovetailed nicely with Sully’s growing conviction that ever since his luck turned, it was his friends who were paying the price. All that bad karma had to go somewhere. Except, no. Of course Rub wasn’t lying beneath the branch. He would’ve been holding the chain saw when the limb fell, not standing beneath it. Sully turned on his high beams though, just to be sure, before backing on out. When the headlights caught the base of the tree, the length of rope attached to the handle of the chain saw registered in Sully’s brain, but he was out in the road and shifting the vehicle into drive before the fragmentary visual and auditory evidence cohered. Even so, he had to sit there, engine idling, for a good minute until he could make himself believe it.
After jerking the truck back into the driveway, he switched off the ignition again and reached across Rub for the flashlight he kept in the glove box. Fearing the batteries might be dead, he tested it on the dog, who looked away, as if embarrassed by where all this was leading. “You already figured this out, didn’t you,” Sully said, and Rub didn’t deny it. “All right, then. Let’s go get him down.”
Eager as the dog had been to get out of the truck before, he seemed reluctant to now, but he obeyed his second command and scooted down off the seat and trotted over to the base of the tree, Sully following, his flashlight playing at the trunk, to which, he now saw, several scraps of wood had been nailed, a makeshift ladder. “Hey, Rub,” he said when the beam found his friend, sitting with his back to the trunk on what remained of the limb he’d sawed off, who knew how many hours ago. Even in the dark, Sully could see his friend’s eyes were swollen from crying. “What’re you doing up there?”
“Guh-guh-guh,” Rub began, but quickly gave up.
“Go away?” Sully guessed.
“Yeah, go away,” he said. For some reason Rub was always able to say whatever had just been stuck in the back of his throat once Sully himself said the words, as if he knew how to say it in German or French, just not English. If Sully guessed wrong, though, Rub’s struggle would continue.
“Okay,” Sully said, “but how long do you plan on staying up there?”
“Fuh-fuh-fuh—”
“Forever?”
“Yeah, forever.”
“That’s not a very good plan, Rub.”
The other Rub barked, evidently agreeing.
“In fact, it’s even dumber than climbing up there by yourself in the first place.”
Difficult though it was to credit, Sully could now see the whole skein of events. Rub, fed up with waiting, finally nailing those wood scraps to the trunk; then climbing up. No doubt he’d attached one end of the rope to his belt after tying the chain saw to the other end so he could hoist it up. Probably he’d hoped he could sit or stand on the branch below the one he meant to saw off, which from the ground might’ve looked possible. Once up in the tree, though, he would’ve realized it wasn’t. If he sat on the lower limb, he couldn’t quite reach the one above; and to stand on it he’d need three hands — the first to steady himself against the trunk and the other two to operate the chain saw. Up there, he’d have seen that his sole option was to sit on the branch he was going to saw off, with his back pressed against the trunk. (Even Rub wasn’t dumb enough to sit on the severed part that was about to fall off.) Only then, after the limb had dropped — okay, sure, Sully was hypothesizing here — and he lowered the chain saw down to the ground by means of the rope, did it occur to Rub that he was now stuck. With nothing to grab on to, he couldn’t rise from his sitting position. Without the branch now lying on the ground, he couldn’t lean forward and rotate around to face the trunk. Nor, with his back to it, could he lower himself down to the next branch and from there to the nearest rung of the makeshift ladder.
“Yeah?” Rub was saying. “Well, go fuh-fuh-fuh—”
“Fuck myself?”
“Yeah, fuck yourself.”
“Hey,” Sully said. “Don’t blame me. You did this to yourself.”
“You wuh-wuh-wuh—”
“I know. I was supposed to come help you, but I forgot. I’m sorry.”
The consequence of this apology, of course, Sully might’ve predicted. Rub began crying again, that same mewling sound he hadn’t recognized before as human sorrow. Not wanting to witness it, Sully turned off the flashlight. “Stay, Rub,” he told the dog, before heading back to the truck for the ladder.
Human Rub’s voice followed him from the tree. “Where the fuh-fuh-fuh-fuck am I gonna go?”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Sully told him.
Sock Drawer
“WHAT DO YOU mean no snake?” she wanted to know.
Raymer, groggy, was sitting in the middle of his office sofa, his hands tented over his boxers. He’d worn briefs his whole life until he disrobed in front of Becka that first time and she’d reacted to them with startled revulsion. “Well,” she said, “that’s going to have to change.” Apparently, it was an iron-clad policy: she dated only men who wore boxers. His sleeveless undershirts had to go as well. He hadn’t really minded switching to boxers, though they took some getting used to, given how they bunched up and gapped at the fly, which was why he’d tented his hands over them now. What did it mean that he hadn’t gone back to briefs now that Becka was gone? The sad truth was that during their short tenure together he’d learned to defer to Becka in most matters. She’d switched him from Colgate to Crest, from Listerine to Scope, from Arrid to Right Guard. Free now to return to his own preferences, he discovered that they’d come to match. Maybe that was what marriage meant, except that in theirs it had been a one-way street. He couldn’t think of a single behavior of Becka’s that he had altered in the slightest. But perhaps that was because there was so little he’d wanted to change, whereas she’d evidently viewed him as a fixer-upper from the start, structurally sound, the sort of property you wouldn’t mind owning after you’d completed all the necessary renovations. First, though, you’d have to gut it, which was pretty much how Raymer felt by the end. As if the overhaul of his person was coming in over budget, and the person footing the bills was having serious second thoughts.