Law & Order droning away, Darla asked me how old I was, then reminded me that her folks were driving up to take us to church the next morning. I love her so, but Christ, how much more sacrifice? Wasn’t I here in Mississippi for her? Had I not left everything for her, my art and community and city and identity, tagging along as she loped home to privilege? Was it really so bad that I was going to stay out and make something?
“You know what, Dar?” I barked. “This is Five Easy Pieces and I am Rayette Dipesto, the waitress, and you are the rich-ass Jack Nicholson character who never feels the gut-sting of not always having everything, every single day of your life. But some of us were born without a net, baby!”
“Whatever, retard,” she said, and hung up.
I looked into the backyard, at this old chrome dog bowl freckled in mud. Willie’s dog, Slump, had died before I even moved to town. Yet his ghost hung around, care of fridge-photos and in doorway floor scar, and in gigs of sprawling video on Willie’s phone. There was the anecdote about the time Slump managed to open the camping cooler, then ate thirty-two squares of Kraft Singles (with plastic wrap), drank a can of Miller Lite, and passed out. The tales of him retrieving live ducklings out of the pond in Town Park, or humping the service dog on the square on Veterans Day. I had come to know Slump as almost a nephew, a dead nephew dog, and I wondered sometimes if I needed a dog of my own, if owning another life would help Darla and me move forward, providing us a whole new history of love.
The boys and I piled into Douglass’s old Bronco, then hit the road with sour mash. I took a drink, said, “Make no mistake, guys. I adore Darla.” They had no reply. I then changed the topic to filmmaking: “You know, Larry Semon was from Mississippi. He was a big motion picture—”
“Ha!” Willie cut me off. “His name was Semen?”
“That would so suck,” Douglass said, and the two of them cackled.
Had I been talking to Darla, or at least to old Darla, we would have worked up our shtick while discussing Larry Semon, the forgotten rival of Chaplin, the recipient of a $5,000-a-week studio salary in the 1920s, who became a fever drunk at the apex of his success and decided to make a slapstick version of The Wizard of Oz, in 1927 (twelve years before the one we all know), with Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man, and with drunk Semon’s drunkard wife cast as Dorothy. A failure so enormous it decimated his career. Died in a California sanitarium, Larry Semon.
But old Darla was not here. The city was not here. The diorama set was not here. It seemed that my only markers of continued growth, of life, were Douglass and Willie, and the film we would make in the Mississippi night.
Douglass stopped off at this boarded-over Victorian shitheap, then got out and snuck around back. He and Willie buy old houses from poor blacks and use Mexicans to fix them up so they can fleece young whites. They started doing so when Douglass was still married to Gina, having bought their first project house care of her VA home loan benefits. Though he and Willie now do quite well, flipping houses all over town, they never update anything in their own home, out of disdain for their benefactress. “Don’t owe Gina or nobody for nothin’,” Douglass says, as if not spending the money he makes exempts his indebtedness to her.
As Willie and I waited, the engine cut and ticking, he confessed that he was worried sick about Douglass. Said he wished Douglass didn’t have to act like such a stupid, stubborn man. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I didn’t. Willie went silent and picked at his cuticles. A minute later Douglass walked back toward us, something big and dark cradled in his arms. He fumbled to open the Bronco’s tailgate, then thunked it in the back.
The stench was a crucifixion of the sinuses. I vomited out the passenger’s window, and began to regret the decision to anger my rich wife. Willie writhed and banged his head against the dashboard. Douglass was somehow unfazed; he laughed, and informed us that it was only a bloated dog carcass. A dead boxer, he said, which he’d found locked in the crawl space when first inspecting the Victorian, its body amid chewed Ziploc bags. He surmised that the dog had eaten whatever it was supposed to guard down there, meth or crack, then OD’d and baked in the heat.
We drove off with our heads flung doglike out the windows. A few minutes later, on a residential street, Douglass cut the headlights and rolled to a stop in front of Gina’s house.
“This is gonna be horrorific,” he whispered, then got out and went for the dead dog. Gas hissed out of the boxer when he picked it up, and a dark liquid ran down the front of his shirt. Douglass cursed God, demanded help. Willie said he had to hold the camera, then raised the Super 8 like a fist. I cursed God, then got out and grabbed the dog’s back legs. The muscles were mush; it seemed as if the beast would crumble from the bone, like decent pork shoulder.
We snuck onto Gina’s front porch heaving with nausea. The dead dog gassed out and made a slick smack when we dropped it. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I knew it was Darla.
Douglass whispered, “Okay, now ram a knife in it.”
“Hell,” I said. “I’m going home.”
He started to argue when the front door flew open. There was Gina, holding us down with a modified twenty-gauge, and clad in olive-green panties and a tan muscle shirt, her dog tags swaying. She had black chevron tattoos on each sculpted deltoid, and she barked commands at us in both Arabic and English.
Douglass cried out for Jesus Christ and calm. From the car, Willie laughed and pointed the camera at us.
“A movie within a movie,” I muttered, staring at the lens.
A legion of cops screeched onto the set. They clubbed us for many minutes and we were charged with alcoholic terrorism.
In the holding cell, Willie and Douglass bickered on as if they were back at home, sitting in twin recliners in front of their television. Across from them I was on my back, on a stainless steel bench, staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking about dogs. About Slump, and the dead boxer. I pictured the latter, frenzied on meth, smashing his head against whatever trapped him in the crawlspace. Smashing and smashing until his dog heart exploded. I could picture his final movements, so very slow in the heat, his last breath leaking out in a whistle.
“Or was it a her?” I asked aloud.
An hour or so later, Willie and Douglass ran out of gripe. In the silence, the jail toilet ran, and we may have even dozed. At some point I looked over and there was Darla, on the other side of the bars, wearing her sky-blue church dress.
“Hey, Dar,” I said.
“Hey,” she replied, her eyes raw from tears. “I’m bailing you out. But then we’re done.”
I begged forgiveness, mentioned Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies. Her mouth turned up a sad kind of smile. As I walked out behind her, fractured and stinking, Willie promised that next time he’d load film in the Super 8, now that we had an idea of what to expect.