What I’m trying to explain is why I’m not crestfallen in the morning when I discover Number Seventeen is gone. Only for a moment does his vanishing come as a surprise, until I remember that sometime during his examination of my marked and unmarked skin he told me that he’d have to be at a roofing job by six. In fact when I first wake up I think I’m lying in a strange motel until I realize that it’s just my mother’s bedroom with its Johnny Carson drapes.
And just like in a cheap motel there’s this loud thump-crash-thumping coming from the other rooms, where I find Louisa romping around with Seventeen’s beast, who’s still chained to the tire that he’s dragging across my mother’s rug. Already they’ve broken one wing off the wingback chair, and now he puts his paw right through a sofa cushion as though he were stepping into a bucket. Hanging from his teeth the dog’s got some kind of translucent seaweed that I finally realize is Louisa’s rainhat.
“What’s going on here?” I scream, but Louisa’s confused that I could be angry on such a joyful morning. “I think that boy left this nice dog for me.” And damned if she’s not right: on the counter there’s a note that reads, Didn’t want to tell you I am married, etc. Wife has allergies and wanted me to put the dog down yesterday, so maybe it was Red’s good luck that I ran into you and your sister, who seems like she could use a hound like him. Spelling is not Seventeen’s best subject; actually the note reads, “I am marred, ect.” I am marred? And I slap myself when I finally get it — should have known he was married. Said his mother was dead and yet that T-shirt reeked of laundry soap.
I crumple the note and yell for Louisa to throw herself between the dog and the knickknack shelf.
“What’s the matter?” Louisa says, too late, as a china lighthouse crashes. “I love this dog.” She drapes her body along his length and squeezes his ribs, which causes the dog to spread his legs and discharge a yellow stream.
Too late for either of us to go to work, I call us in sick while Louisa lies on the sofa holding a block of frozen peas to her head while Red laps from the toilet. “I have a hangover,” Louisa moans, doling out the word like it’s a million bucks. Before noon the toilet’s dry and Red is hankering for out, so we take him down to the vacant lot. First I have to take a hacksaw to his chain to cut the tire free, and then Louisa uses a plastic jump rope as a leash, on the end of which he strains and wheezes. Louisa bellows, Hold on, boy! as we zigzag down the street.
As soon as we get there and she lets go, Red’s bolting across the wasteland like a streak, the spiky late summer wildflowers still in bloom but what does the dog care about that kind of beauty as he tramples it underfoot. Louisa follows in hot pursuit, and soon the two of them are leaping through the field while I hang back at the edge of the street.
“What are you waiting for?” she yells. “Mummy’ll be home soon.”
Now Red stops to look back at me, his dark eyes flashing, one rear paw scratching up some rocks. I think it’s me he wants, but when I step forward his hackle-hair rises. And oh, how these bad boys can snarl.
No, not me, as he trots off in the wake of my sister’s dust with a whimper that is musical and soft. And damned if I don’t know that trick, how they’ll sing you a schmoozey song before they break your heart like a china plate.
But it’s no use trying to warn her; she would just think I was trying to keep him for my own private thrill. The thrill of being smashed into and crashing, when he knocks her down and they go rolling through the weeds.
BIG-DOT DAY
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Arnie’s mother said more than once on the drive out, “Vegas was no place for a child.” They’d gone to Las Vegas because of the last guy, and now the new guy thought he could line up work on a salmon fishing boat, which was why they were driving to a place on the Washington coast that his mother kept calling the end of the earth. At least one good thing about this place, Arnie figured, would be that if his mother took it into her head to move any farther west they’d have to set sail for China. And his mother usually didn’t go in for Chinese guys.
The new guy had been an abrupt transaction. This morning, which was now yesterday morning, Arnie was woken by the crinkling sound of his mother putting his clothes into plastic grocery bags. “You can bring one toy,” she said, and he chose a flying lizard that transformed into an attack spaceship. But when she put the bags in the hatchback of their old Datsun, she saw he’d also thrown his fishing pole in.
“I said one toy,” she’d objected. “We still have to fit Jay’s tools and the TV.” But he’d argued that a fishing pole was not the same thing as a toy, and the new guy intervened on his behalf, assuring her that the fishing pole might come in handy.
“Lotta fish in that ocean,” he said. “Lotta salmon in those creeks.” Arnie knew the new guy’s name was Jay, but the old guy’s name had been Ray and Arnie was afraid of mixing them up. Like the lizard and the attack ship, they were mostly interchangeable: same body — long-armed, short, and barrel-chested — but with different heads. Over the years, the guys stayed the same age while his mother got older. In this way they were the one constant she maintained.
The new guy had a beard and he drove, their Datsun blowing blue smoke out the back. From the back seat, Arnie saw the Sierras swirling away in a haze of blue mist. The new guy called Arnie “Little Man.”
“Yo, Little Man back there, fish me up another pack of cigs.”
It was morning when they left, and it was the next morning but earlier still when the Datsun sputtered up the coastal range and finally glided down its westward edge, exiting the firs that closed over the road just as the first light silvered the edges of the bay. Giant brown creatures, standing chest-high in the marsh grass, stared at them as they drove by.
“Elk,” said the new guy. “Ain’t that something.” Arnie’s mother was sleeping, slumped against where the window handle would have been if it hadn’t broken off. There were dozens of elk, chewing thoughtfully, whisking their tails to reveal their white rumps.
“Hey, whose idea was this?” the new guy said, reaching back between the seats to muss up Arnie’s hair.
When the road finally ran out underneath them, they checked into a motel, where Arnie’s mother stumbled into bed without ever fully waking. The new guy snored like a car ignition trying to catch, holding out the possibility of something about to happen. Which might not ever happen. For a long while Arnie lay on his own bed and tried to sleep, but couldn’t. There was too much bed and it made him feel exposed, as if he were camped out on the desert.
Actually, he’d liked living in the desert, how clean it made him feel. Instead of a lawn they had a whole yard full of white rocks. But in Las Vegas he had missed water, real water and not the fake-o reservoirs stocked with stupid placid perch. He missed the idea of himself living by a creek and him being the boy who sits on the bank of it, fishing. It was something he’d done only a few times, back when they’d lived in Denver, and he’d never caught anything but still he’d liked it. The quietness, sure, but also the promise that fishing made about another world existing right under your nose. A world with animals who could extract the secret air inside of water, using combs they carried in the sides of their own necks. This was how the new guy, Jay, had sold Arnie on the trip, even though it meant leaving the white rocks and all his other stuff behind. Jay had promised him that when they got to the end of the earth there would be lots of fishing.