“We dragged the hog and the dog back to the truck in the dark, tossed them in back and drove on back to the camphouse, and told these two swamp idiots on the porch, a couple of beady-eyed brothers, to take care of the hog, and then we drank some whiskey and went to bed. The next day, when we were leaving, one of the swamp idiots, name was Benny, had this old cheap pipe stuck in the comer of his mouth, brings out a big ice chest full of meat wrapped in butcher paper. And he says, ‘We goin’ on into town, now. Me and Fredrick put yo meat in this icebox, and Daddy’n them took some of the meat from the big’un.’ ”
Here Skeet stopped talking and let silence hang there a moment, and sipped from a fresh drink Russell had set down on the arm of his Adirondack. Hoyt gestured to his plate.
“So you saying this might be hog, might be dog.”
“Tastes mighty sweet to be dog,” Bill Burton said.
“Some of it’s sweeter than the rest,” Skeet allowed.
Everybody had a laugh over that, sitting there picking their teeth with minty toothpick wedges Russell had passed around from a little silver box. He freshened the drinks. The afternoon seemed to slide pleasantly, almost imperceptibly, along the equinoctial groove toward autumn.
“I TELL YOU SOMETHING,” BAILEY SAID THEN. “I GOT A story to tell, too. Skeet’s story brings me to mind of it.”
The immediate shift in mood was as palpable as if someone had walked up and slapped each one of us in the mouth. We sat in our Adirondacks, sunken, silent, and trying to focus on the boy on the lake bank tossing the ball to his dogs swimming the shallows. Holding our breaths this wouldn’t be the old epic of Bailey’s yawping grief.
“You know this fellow, my erstwhile friend and partner, Reid Covert.”
“Bailey, ain’t you got any dessert to go with this fine barbecue?” Skeet said.
Bailey held his hand up. “No, now, hear me out,” he said, his eyes fixed somewhere out over the lake. He made a visible effort to relax. “It’s a good story, it’s all in fun.”
All right, someone mumbled, let him tell it.
“But that’s not saying it ain’t true,” Bailey said, and turns to us with such a devilish grin that we’re all a little won over by it. It was a storyteller’s smile. A liar’s smile.
All right, everybody said, easing up, go ahead on.
“Y’all didn’t know a thing about this,” he said, “but I whipped that sorry sapsucker’s ass three times before I finally got rid of him.”
Three times! we said.
“Kicked his ass.”
No! we said. We had fresh mint juleps in our hands. Russell stood to one side in his white serving jacket, looking out over the lake. Out in the yard, the boy Lee chased the chocolate Labs Buddy and Junior down to the water. He had a blue rubber-looking ball in his hand and he stopped at the bank, holding the ball up, and the dogs leaped into the air around him. Junior knocked the boy all over the place, trying to get his chops on the ball. He knocked off the boy’s glasses and then grabbed the ball when the boy got down on his knees to retrieve them.
“The first time I heard about it I went into his office and confronted him,” Bailey said. “He denied it. But, hell, I knew he was lying. It was after five. The nurses had gone, receptionist gone, insurance clerk gone. No patients. I told him, ‘You’re lying, Reid.’ He just sat there then, looking stupid, and I knew I was right. I went over and slapped him. My own partner. Friend since elementary school. Went through med school together. Slapped shit out of him. ‘How long has it been going on?’ I said. He just sat there. I told him to get up but he wouldn’t. So I slapped him again. He still just sat there. I tried to pick him up out of his chair by his shirt but he held onto the goddamn armrests, so I slapped him again. ‘Stop it, Bailey,’ he says then. ‘Stop it, hell,’ I said. I said, ‘Get up, you son of a bitch.’ And he says, ‘Stop it, Bailey.’ And so I said, ‘You son of a bitch, I want you out of this office, you and I are through.’ And I walked out.”
We were all quiet again then. It was as bad as we’d thought it would be. Bailey hadn’t worked in weeks. All his patients had to go to Birmingham. Reid Covert had taken off somewhere, and Bailey’s wife, Maryella, had gone off, too. Everybody figured they were together. And I was thinking, I guess he’ll ask me to help him divide his and Reid’s business, too.
“Well,” Bailey went on then, “Maryella wouldn’t talk to me about it, and I kept hearing they were still seeing each other. So I drove over to his house one day and pulled up as he was trying to leave. I cut off his car with mine, got out, went over, and pulled him out of his goddamn Jeep Cherokee. He didn’t even get the thing into Park, it rolled over and ran into a pine tree. And I mean I pummeled him, right there in his own goddamn front yard. Berry, she came out into the yard yelling at me, went back in to call the police, and old Reid, I’m beating the shit out of him, his nose is bloody, and he’s holding out his arm toward Berry and saying, No, don’t call the police. I let go of him and watched him limp after her, then I got back into my car and came out here. When I got here Maryella passed me in the driveway, zooming out onto the road, dust flying. Hell, Berry must’ve called her instead of the cops. Hell, she left Lee out in the goddamn yard with the dogs and went to her mother’s house, didn’t come home for two days, and when she did I had her suitcase packed and told her to get the hell out.”
All this — all the detail, anyway — was new, we had not heard it from the various sources. The boy, Lee, was throwing the blue ball into the water now and the dogs were swimming out to get it, then swimming back in, whereupon the one without it, usually the boorish Junior, would chase the one who had it, his daddy Buddy, and get it away from him. Whereupon the boy would chase down Junior, get the ball, and throw it back out into the lake.
“Look at that,” Bailey said. “I tell you it was Reid’s bitch Lab we mated Buddy with to get that sorry Junior? I should’ve drowned the goddamn dog.”
A couple of us, Hoyt and me, got up for barbecue seconds. Dog or hog, it was good, and Bailey’s story was eating at my stomach in a bad way. I needed something more in it.
“Y’all eat up,” Bailey said. “What’s left belongs to the niggers.” Old Russell, standing off to one side of the barbecue table, sort of shifted his weight and blinked, still looking out over the lake. Bailey saw this and pulled his lips tight over his teeth. “Sorry, Russell,” he mumbled. Russell, his eyes fixed on the lake’s far shore, appeared unfazed. Bailey got up, went inside, and came back out with the bottle of Knob Creek. He poured some into his mint julep cup and drank it.
“Well, finally, I followed him one day, and I watched him meet her in the parking lot of the Yacht Club, and I followed them way out here, down to the Deer Lick landing. I’d cut my lights, and I parked up the road, and then I walked down. I had my.38 pistol with me, but I wasn’t going to kill them. I had me some blanks, and I’d screwed a little sealing wax into that little depression at the end of the blanks. You ever noticed that, that little depression? When I got down there they weren’t in the car. I looked around and saw a couple standing down on the beach, just shadows in that darkness, so I walked down there. They looked around when I walked up to them, and when they realized it was me it scared them pretty bad, me showing up. I stepped up to him and said, ‘I told you to give it up, Reid,’ and that’s when he hit me, almost knocked me down. I guess he wanted to get the first lick in, for once. I went back at him, and it was a real street fight, pulling hair and wrestling and kicking and throwing a punch every now and then, and hell Maryella might have been in on it for all I know. I finally threw him down onto the sand, and his shirt ripped off in my hands. Maryella was standing with her feet in the water, with her hands over her face, and I was standing there over Reid, out of breath and worn out. And he looked up then and said, ‘You’re going to have to kill me to get rid of me, Bailey. I love her.’ So I pulled out the pistol from my pocket and said, ‘All right.’ And I shot him. All five rounds.”