“Oh, very much,” she says. “Is it scotch?”
“Oban. You know it?”
“No. But it smells good.”
“You can smell it over that”—it wouldn’t do to say shit before he knows her character—“other smell?”
“I can smell it. It smells like peat and burned seaweed.”
“Ice?”
“Please.”
He enters the house and fills two glasses, pleased at the turn the evening is taking. He glances at his nearly transparent reflection in the hutch, thinking he doesn’t look so good. But not awful for almost seventy. He walks out back again, managing the screen door with more difficulty, burdened as he is with two dripping glasses now.
Still no woman.
The wooden handrails stand out, brilliantly illuminated against the primordial darkness behind them.
He looks down to see if Caspar is still wagging his welcome at her.
But Caspar is gone.
He sets the glasses down and whistles.
He walks to the rickety stairs and hoists himself down to the level of the beach, his back deck bathed in light and receding with each step down. He steps onto sand that soon gives way to rocks, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. He listens for the sound of Caspar’s collar, the jingling of the tag with the dog’s name and his master’s information, and the legend Help me get home! but all he hears is Lake Ontario’s languid whisper and a gentle breeze in the crowns of the maples and birch trees behind him.
His sandaled foot plunges into a puddle, which some precivilized part of his brain registers as incorrect—the tide doesn’t come this far and it has not rained—but he walks on.
“Girl, you didn’t take my dog, did you?” he asks in Russian.
Nothing.
He walks farther down the beach, closer to the water, the smooth rocks pushing up against his sandals’ bottoms.
“Caspar?” he says, his concern for the dog growing and mixing with anger. Has this bitch with the Leningrad accent taken his dog? Is there a market in upstate New York for old mixed-breed dogs who flatulate like dying grandmothers?
Here is the devil, he thinks.
Now he hears the jingle of the collar behind him.
Is the old bastard actually going up the stairs on his own power instead of whimpering to be carried?
He remembers the smoky amber of his whiskey and feels happy to be making his way back to it.
He climbs up, hearing the jingle inside the house.
“You little fucker,” he says, smiling.
Warm light spills from the windows and door of the cabin.
He looks for the whiskey and finds only two wet rings on the table.
That is incorrect.
Another sound registers as incorrect, though familiar.
His shower is running.
A sly smile creeps onto his face.
The girl. What game is she playing? This night will be very good or very bad, but at least it will produce a story.
This was the sort of thing his father said.
He takes his sandals off and opens the screen door, stepping in. He finds the floor wet. He goes to the hallway and stands before the closed bathroom door—God in heaven, it stinks of the lake in here—and then he turns the handle. The shower is running, the curtain pulled back to show the rusty showerhead and the bad grout.
No steam, though.
The water runs cold.
He turns it off.
An empty rocks glass sits in the sink, one very long auburn hair coiled near it. He plucks this from the off-white porcelain and looks at it—how coarse it is!
Hearing Caspar’s jingle, he goes into the hallway again, and his heart skips a beat.
A woman stands in the hallway, pale and nude, her hair thick and russet-colored and wetly quilting her shoulders and breasts. His eyes trail down to her tight, alabaster navel, below which a scud of curly hair leads to the kind of prodigious bush one doesn’t see on young women these days except on specialty Internet sites.
The second whiskey glass drips in her hand.
With the pointer finger of her other hand, she makes her collar jingle. Caspar’s collar, more properly, which she wears on her neck.
The man has bounced between shock, worry, anger, and glad surprise so precipitously that when he speaks he only sounds old and bewildered.
“Where’s my fucking dog?”
“Help me get home,” she says, showing yellow-gray teeth that don’t belong in the mouth of a first-world girl. “That is very sweet, Misha.”
The smell that pollutes his cabin is coming from her, maybe from that thick, cabled wet hair, maybe even from her mouth or cunt. How can something so beautiful smell like that?
He notices now how scarred and sinewy she is, how strong her limbs look.
“You didn’t hurt him, did you?” he asks in Russian.
“You’ll kiss me now even if I did,” she says in English, moving the mouth with the bad teeth and the beautiful lips closer.
He thinks to pull away, but he does not.
Something about her eyes fixes him in place.
How green they are.
How cold her mouth is.
He tries to pull away, but her hand has found the back of his head and anchors it where she wants it. His mouth is too full of cold tongue for him to yell.
Past her, he sees his collarless dog pad from the kitchen, squaring his lips and wagging gently, unsure what to make of the struggle in the hallway.
When she drags the old Russian down the stairs and to the lake, the dog follows, even down the stairs, but he only walks to the lip of the water, where he paces back and forth as the woman who does not smell like a woman pushes his master’s head below the surface.
He thrashes, but she holds him under with ease.
The dog has enough beagle in him to make him howl.
Owoooooooooo
She howls back at him playfully until her head goes under, and the dog is alone.
PART ONE
1
This is what Andrew does at the AA meeting.
He says his piece when he has to.
He translates the God stuff in his head so it makes sense to him.
He tries very hard to let the new people know he’s listening to them—he brightens his speech when he says “Hi, [new person]” and “Thanks, [new person],” and he does his best not to categorize them into will-be-back, won’t-be-back, because that feels just a little too black-and-white, sheep-and-goats Manichean to him, and one thing Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is not about is black and white.
He is a calm-eyed icon of gray areas.
And if he does sometimes think, That guy’s just here because it’s part of his DUI deal or That woman’s going to drive into the parking lot of the Driftwood Bar and Grill and back out again three times tonight before she turns her car off and trots in with her head down, he chides himself afterward.
Who are you to caricature them?
What do you really know, O wise seer?
If you saw someone like yourself walk in, would you know what you were? Could there be two of you within driving range of this rural Presbyterian church? And how did it feel to have them all look at you when you first came? And know that some of them were thinking, Probably a faggot, and some were thinking, Belongs in the city with that hair.
Not that new people come in so very often, or that they’re really all that new. The woman who’ll probably go to the Driftwood buys produce at the Orchards—he’s seen her with her faintly electric bottle-red hair and the buzz-cut child who pulls at her sleeve and whines like he’s two years younger than he looks. The DUI guy he doesn’t know, but a Lexus pulled up and ejected him while Andrew smoked with his friends.