Back in the bean field, Barry felt a mild wave of hysteria pass over him once more, one in which he imagined writing a memo to Royce about having been knee-deep in soybean futures, much to report, et cetera, et cetera; by the way, couldn’t seem to lay hands on Louisiana man’s dog, et cetera, et cetera. Hope dog-face girl’s teeth didn’t all fall out. More later, yrs, B. After which, he felt glumly merry and irresponsible.
When he got to his car, it occurred to him that this had all happened a couple of miles from Tippett’s house. No great distance for a hyena like Bandit. So he drove over there, to find the house unlighted and silent. He walked to the door. A bark broke out and was muffled. Barry knocked. The door opened and Tippett said, “I thought you went to Louisiana.”
“Hand him over,” said Barry.
“Come in,” said Tippett. Barry walked into the empty room. Tippett had a loose T-shirt on, and his pants were held by the top button only. Barry looked all around and saw nothing. He felt uncertain.
“Didn’t Bandit come back?”
Tippett didn’t answer. He just sat down and poured from the whiskey bottle that was right where he’d left it earlier. “You lose that dog?” he asked. Something tapped across the floor in the next room. He doesn’t want to go to Louisiana, he thought, and he surely doesn’t want to go with me. A wave of peace came over him.
“Yeah, I did,” said Barry, rising in his own esteem. The old man studied him closely, studied his face and every little thing he did with his hands. Barry raised his glass to his lips, thinking only of the movement and the whiskey. He quit surveying the old man’s possessions and wondering what time it was somewhere else.
“What do you suppose would make a trained dog just go off and leave like that?” Barry asked.
The old man made a sound in his throat, almost clearing it to speak something which must not be misunderstood. “Son,” he said, “anything that’ll eat shit and fuck its own mother is liable to do anything.” The two men laughed as equals.
Barry thought of the men down in the Confederate graveyard. He considered the teeth of Mike Royce’s daughter and his own “future.” Above all, he thought of how a dog could run so far that, like too many things, it never came back.
LIKE A LEAF
I’m underneath my small house in Deadrock. The real estate people call it a “starter” home, however late in life you buy one. It’s a modest house that gives you the feeling that either you’re going places or that this won’t do. This starter home is different; this one is it.
From under here, I can hear the neighbors talking. He is a successful man named Deke Patwell. His wife is away and he is having an affair with the lady across the street, a sweet and exciting lady I’ve not met yet. Frequently he says to her, “I am going to impact on you, baby.” Today, they are at one of their many turning points.
“I think I’m coming unglued,” she says.
“Now, now.”
“I don’t follow,” she says with a little heat.
“All is not easy.”
“I got that part, but when do we go someplace nice?” She has a beautiful voice, and underneath the house I remember she is pretty. What am I doing here? I’m distributing bottle caps of arsenic for the rats that come up from the river and dispute the cats over trifles. I represent civilization in a small but real way.
Deke Patwell laughs with wild relief. Once I saw him at the municipal pool, watching young girls. He was wearing trunks and allergy-warning dog tags. What a guy! To me he was like a crude foreigner or a gaucho.
Anyway, I came down here because of the rats. Read your history: they carry Black Plague. Mrs. Patwell was on a Vegas excursion with the Deadrock Symphony Club.
When I get back inside, the flies are causing a broad dumb movement on the windows. We never had flies like this on the ranch. We had songbirds, apple blossoms, and no flies. My wife was alive then and saw to that. We didn’t impact, we loved each other. She had an aneurism let go while carding wool. She just nodded her pretty face and headed out. I sat there like a stupe. They came for her and I just knocked around the place trying to get it. I headed for town and started seeing the doctor. Things came together: I was able to locate a place to live in, catch the Series, and set up housekeeping. Plus, the Gulch, everyone agrees, is Deadrock’s nicest neighborhood. A traffic violator is taken right aside and lined out quick. It’s a neighborhood where folks teach the dog to bring the paper to the porch, so a guy can sit back in his rocker and find out who’s making hamburger of the world. I was one of this area’s better cattlemen, and town life doesn’t come easy. Where I once had coyotes and bears, I now have rats. Where I once had the oldtime marriages of my neighbors, I now have Impact Man poking a real sweet gal who never gets taken someplace nice.
My eating became hit-or-miss. All I cared about was the World Series after a broken season. I was high and dry, and when you’re like that you need someone or something to take you away. Death makes you different like the colored are different. I felt I was under the spell of what had happened to me. Then someone threw a bottle onto the field in the third or fourth game of the Series and almost hit the Yankee left fielder, Dave Winfield. I felt completely poisoned. I felt like a rat with a mouthful of bottle caps. All my sense of fairness was settled on Winfield, who is colored, like I felt having been in the company of death. Then Winfield couldn’t hit the ball anyway, and just when Reggie Jackson got his hitting back, what happens? He drops an easy pop fly.
What were my wife and I discussing when she died? The Kona Coast. It seems so small. Sometimes when I think how small our topic was, I feel the weight of my hair tearing at my face. I bought a youth bed to reduce the size of the unoccupied area. The doctor says because of the shaking, I get quite a little bit less rest per hour than the normal guy. Rapid eye movement, and so on.
Truthfully speaking, part of me has always wanted to live in town. You hear the big milling at the switching yard and, on stormy nights, the transcontinental trucks reroute off the interstate, and it’s busy and kind of like a last-minute party at somebody’s house. The big outfits are parked all over with their engines running, and the heat shivers at the end of the stacks. The old people seem brave trying to get around on the ice: one fall and they’re through, but they keep chunking, going on forward with a whole heck of a lot of grit. That fact gives me a boost.
And I love to window-shop. I go from window to window alongside people I don’t know. There’s never anything I want in there, but I feel good because I am excited when somebody picks out a daffy pair of shoes or a hat you wouldn’t put on your dog. My wife couldn’t understand this. Nature was a shrine to her. I wanted to see people more than she did. Sit around with just anybody and make smart remarks. Sometimes I’d pack the two of us into the hills. My wife would be in heaven. I’d want to buy a disguise and slip off to town and stare through the windows. That’s the thing about heaven. It comes in all sizes and shapes.