"I mean a dog isn't something you just fool around with to amuse yourself and then ignore when you get interested in something else, is it?"
"No, dear."
"Right," he said. "People like that shouldn't be allowed to own dogs."
Bauer was confounded by the quality of Kathy's intimacy. There was nothing she wouldn't say, nothing she wouldn't do. There were no guarded rooms within her. She told him willingly about her life, but it was clear that histories meant little to her, at best offered mild anecdotal material to fill silences that had become boring.
Courteously, but without much interest, she asked a few questions about his life. He was largely tempted to allow himself to be seduced into her sense of present, with its vitality and lucid focus. Certainly it was pleasurable, and she was right, the hour past was dead, the one to come unborn. But his old self mocked. And though that self had served him poorly, it was of some power nonetheless, and not easily discarded.
But most telling-while she withheld nothing, she could not be touched.
He could find no core in her, she was a single plane, and nothing, he suspected, meant more to her than anything else. Hers was an indifferent intimacy, a candor without consequence. They had fun together, but always, around the periphery, Bauer sensed a lifeless chill. It unsettled him, intimating, as it did, the quality of his own malaise.
He telephoned Elizabeth Collier. She was busy, she said, and he was disappointed, but she ended the brief exchange by saying, "Please call me again, though. I'd like to see you." The following week he did.
They had an early dinner then drove fifty miles to Hammertown, where a theater showed art films on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and saw a German piece. It was uncompromising and starkly stylized, but had the weight to back up its mad risks. It was a good film.
Elizabeth lived in a trim white-sided house set back from her office and kennel, on the outskirts of Covington. He walked her to her door.
He put his hand on her hair, which was very soft, cupping her head, and kissed her lightly. He drew back to say goodnight, because while she'd been animated and seemed to have a good time, she'd markedly given no indication that anything beyond pleasant companionship was possible, but he paused with the word in his mouth, possibly through intuition but more likely, he thought, in the flicker of the suspension, because of wish.
She pursed her mouth. "Why don't you come in and have a drink," she said.
Inside, she poured him a brandy and excused herself. She returned in a long satiny nightdress cinched at the waist with a braided cord, Grecian and beautiful.
She was a long woman. There was pliant grace in her. Subtly, but with firmness, she kept their lovemaking formal and calm. His orgasm was sweet.
He didn't know whether or not she counterfeited her own. She wore reins, but they were firmly in her own hands.
In the soporism that followed, she fit herself in against him and said gently, though the words were blunt, "Let's nap, but please, my house is my own, and that's important to me. I don't want anyone to stay over the night."
Later when he was driving home, beneath a rind of moon and stars that glittered in configurations he'd never been able to read, he wondered if it was not Ursula who hadn't wanted him, but he who had not wanted her; not Kathy who was without core, but he who lacked dimension; not Elizabeth armored with a hard carapace, but he who barricaded himself. Or was he an aberrant hive insect in a race of solipsists? If he'd been an adolescent, he might have thought that he loved Elizabeth Collier.
Buddy Stokes knew where there was a pack of dogs. Maybe they were the ones that had attacked the McPhee kid, maybe not. But there were five of them and they were wild.
He was lumbering a parcel up at the narrow end of Watson Hollow, which notched between the flanks of Heerman's Mountain and Claypipe. A New York doctor owned the whole valley, more than 400 acres. There was a lot of good maple in the high 50. The doctor had sold the maple, standing, to a baseball bat manufacturer and jobbed the felling and skidding to Stokes.
The first morning, Stokes walked the land familiarizing himself with the growth and formulating a program. He was done by noon. He sat on a log, opened his six-pack and ate the sandwiches in his bag. He crushed the empty cans in one hand as he finished them and tossed them back over his shoulder. He lit a cigar afterward, thinking about nothing. He wasn't much for thinking. What happened in his mind was more a series of pictures, like random slides projected on a screen, in soft, almost blurred focus. Sometimes he had emotions about the pictures-especially the sexual ones-other times he didn't. He had no trouble sleeping, and liked his dreams. Smoking, he pictured Digger.
The stitches were out, the cast gone, the bandaging removed. The dog walked a little gimpy and was hairless horny scar tissue from its withers halfway up its skull. Ugly as sin, but by God he'd come through-worth every fucking penny to the vet-and he'd be able to fight in Florida. That was a dog with two pair of balls.
Stokes put the cigar out and set up the side of Claypipe chewing the butt.
He hadn't been up the mountain in two or three years. He wanted to look for deer sign, see if it was worth a stop this fall. He found rich droppings and well traveled runs, many buck rubbings.
And he found the remnants of a slaughtered fawn, too.
The carcass was eight or nine days old, there were maggots in the jellied eyes and the few remaining bits of meat. He spent half an hour sorting out the sign around it. The ground had been wet when it happened, and for a day or two after, and had hardened into a pretty good record. Dogs running a doe and a fawn. The fawn lagging here.
The dogs on it, paw print over paw print.
The doe went on another hundred yards, then spun back. She made a fight of it. Gutsy. She was lucky they were hard on the fawn and didn't pay her much mind except to defend themselves. She stayed until it was all over for the fawn. And was probably ripped bad herself.
Then she fled, and the dogs settled down to feed. Coons and skunks after the dogs. Crows. Maggots and bugs finishing up now. The hide would rot into the soil in a year or two.
He quartered a half mile up the mountain. A few tracks, where the ground would take them. Some droppings partially scratched over. A place in the lee of a boulder, alongside an inch-deep rivulet of water, where they'd bedded down, the grass matted in ovoids.
There was no point trying to track them. For every small stretch that would hold their sign, there were acres, miles that wouldn't. Even with a clear trail, he could have tracked them weeks, months, around and up and down the mountains and never seen the tip of a tail. Not a dog gone wild. There wasn't anything smarter in the woods. That was a joke, those state cops and sheriff's deputies who'd gone after them. A woods dog knew when it was being hunted, and unless you had it in a dead panic it could slip right by you fifty yards away while you were picking your nose to hell and back wondering if you were on the wrong mountain.
Stokes didn't like pets, mutts or fancy show animals. A dog was a working animal, like a man. Trackers, guard dogs, pit fighters, those were animals to respect. So was a woods dog. A man could be proud of himself for taking one down. Stokes wouldn't hunt anything he didn't respect, just as he wouldn't fight anyone but big truckers and bar brawlers; you couldn't slap yourself on the back for whipping on some simpy faggot.
Buddy Stokes was going to get himself a wild dog. Drag it right into Harry Wilson and get his picture in the paper. Then he'd lead the assholes in and show 'em where, sit back and see if they could stumble on the others, or make fools of themselves the way they did last time.
The next two mornings he arrived at the hollow an hour before dawn and took up a stand as the woods were coming awake. He held it, cradling his.338 Browning, until noon, when he gave it up and went to do a little cutting.