Biloxi

by Mary Miller

  “She looks like a Layla,” Beth said. She got my dog’s face in her hands and leaned in close.

  “I’ve never met one before, so I don’t know what one might look like.”

  “I knew a girl—she was a lady, actually. She had very soulful eyes just like these,” she said. “She died of the flu. It’s hard to believe that people actually die of the flu, but thousands die each year, apparently. Mostly old people, I’m sure, but still. . . . This Layla wasn’t old.”

  “That’s a terrible way to go,” I said, though I didn’t know if it was a terrible way to go. It didn’t seem that bad, really—it probably didn’t hurt much and was fairly quick. I thought of an old high-school friend who’d died in his chair one evening, fell asleep with the TV on and never woke up. That was either the best way to go or the worst. Best because you’re gone, painless, no time to repent or grasp what’s coming. Worst because of those things, too.

  I wandered out of the circle and Layla followed. A bulldog followed us, too, trotting alongside trying to get our attention. The bulldog ran under her and she looked confused, but I found it delightful and clapped. I came upon a dirty rope and flung it. They ran after it and Layla picked it up. The bulldog tried to take it from her and there was a tussle but their hearts weren’t in it.

  “Bring it here!” I called. “Bring me the rope.”

  The bulldog ran back to its owner. I walked over and flung the rope again and Layla went after it, picked it up, and sat in the grass. We did this a few more times and then walked out of one gate and the other as I wondered whether it was bad manners not to say goodbye.

  “Well,” I said. “You can’t fetch. I’ll add that to the list of things you can’t do. You do know how to chase something, though. You’ve mastered that first part.” I didn’t want her to get too down on herself.

  On the way home, I made one turn and then another, and realized I was going to Harry Davidson’s house. I just wanted to see if the balloons were there, if his dog giveaway was over. Layla sat up straighter in the back seat. I looked at her and then reached my arm around to pet her, veering off the road.

  “Don’t get worried, girl,” I said. “I’m not taking you back. You’re all mine. Harry Davidson, LPN, doesn’t know what he’s lost. Or maybe he does. I’m surprised he hasn’t called me and tried to Indian-give you. That doesn’t make sense but you know what I mean. He doesn’t have my number, anyway. No way for him to get in touch. . . .”

  I slowed and pulled up in front of a neighbor’s house. The balloons were gone, as was the sign. There was a light blue car in the driveway that I didn’t remember from before and a truck that I did. Layla began to whine, sat up straighter. I cracked the window so she could get a whiff.

  “This is where you used to live,” I said, “though I think you know that. You’re smart. More like a person than a dog, really, just like the fat man said. You’re also really shitty at being a dog, if I’m being honest about it, but you probably know that, too.”

  I nursed the warm beer and assessed the situation. I was getting hungry.

  When the whining increased in volume, I told Layla to come on up as I yanked at her collar. She scrambled into the front seat and then she was sitting alongside me, exactly where she belonged. Why had I been putting her in the back? There was no reason for her to sit back there all by herself. I cracked the passenger side window a few inches and told her to calm down. I wasn’t returning her. This was just a stakeout to see if we might get a peek at Harry Davidson’s wife, if in fact he had a wife, which I had my doubts about.

  I was thinking about Wendy’s drive-thru in earnest by the time a woman walked down the driveway and stood at the mailbox, reached her arm all the way inside. She pulled her arm out and reached in again and then crouched to look. The woman was average-faced, neither fat nor thin. She was a lot younger than Harry Davidson and it was possible she was the daughter or stepdaughter instead of the wife. But she was too old to be the daughter, or didn’t seem like daughter material. She wore her brown hair in a ponytail, blue jean shorts, and a white long-sleeve T-shirt that said PINK on it. I had seen shirts like it many times. What did PINK mean? Was it some kind of vaginal thing? I hoped like hell it wasn’t. It probably just meant girls liked the color pink, though not Maxine or Ellen. Her dark-colored bra was visible through her shirt and I felt a tingle, a definite tingle, and readjusted.

  There was nothing about the woman that was memorable except for a long scar running down one of her legs; it went from underneath her shorts all the way to her ankle. Reminded me of a lightning bolt. Would it be raised and bumpy if I ran my finger over it? It was like a colorful tattoo, a decoration. Her legs were rather thick, thicker than her upper half would suggest.

  As I attempted to get a better look, my elbow hit the steering wheel and the horn sounded, just the briefest of friendly honks, more like a nudge or a wink. She turned to look at me, the mail in one arm as she shaded her eyes with the other. I drove off in a way that would, by all appearances, make me look guilty, as if I’d really been up to no good when I didn’t know what I’d been up to. I hadn’t been up to anything. I’d only wanted to see the woman and I had. But I also wanted to see her again, wanted to know her name. I thought about how I’d asked Harry Davidson her name out of the blue, without thinking about what I was doing, and how I’d known I would like her even then. And there was the sad dog named Bruno and the girl that had a dog named Bruno. There were all sorts of connections happening all the time if you paid attention.

  How could a wife seem like such a curious thing simply because she wasn’t mine? I knew what wives were like. I’d had one long enough. The longer you had one, the more unkempt they grew. They stopped shaving and painting their toenails, stopped wearing clothes that fit them properly, opting instead for T-shirts and boxer shorts from your own drawers as if they couldn’t even be bothered to wash their clothes any longer, all while blaming you for the state of their lives.

  As we were cruising along the beach, I talked it out with Layla. Why had I wanted to see Harry Davidson’s wife? How had I known I would like her, without any way of actually knowing it? There had been something about her, many things: the scar on her leg and her long hair, limp as it was, that I wanted to take out of its ponytail and run my fingers through, her thick legs, the arm disappearing inside the mailbox and the sharpness of the elbow. I couldn’t recall ever thinking about a woman’s elbow before. And how she’d moved her hips back and forth as she walked even though there was no one around to see her. What was this woman doing with Harry Davidson? Life was a mystery. It was a goddamn mystery and I didn’t like it one bit. It was also the only thing worth living for. I had a brief and bizarre image of Harry Davidson’s wife working an elbow into my eye socket.

  I drove through Wendy’s and purchased three hamburgers—two for me and one for Layla—and then cruised along the beach as we ate. The beach was beautiful, white sand shipped in from far away and combed daily. The water was brown and murky but it was something you could overlook from a vehicle with the sun shining and the palm trees and sailboats, the stately old homes with their enormous oaks that had survived the storm. I liked to catch the flash of Mardi Gras beads in the trees, mixed in among the Spanish moss.

  “It’ll trick you,” Maxine said once, “you’ll be driving along the beach as the sun’s setting and it’s all so beautiful but it’s all just a trick.” Though she was born less than a mile from the beach, Maxine was like her mother, terrified of the water, but we insisted she learn how to swim; she’d hated every minute of those lessons—cried and pitched tantrums. I didn’t know why she’d come back. There had been nothing here besides me and Ellen and she’d hardly been speaking to us at that point. Home was a funny thing. You returned and you didn’t know why, you returned even when it was the last place you wanted to be, perhaps because it was the only place you could imagine. When Maxine left I’d hoped she would stay gone, not just because of how things had been, but because I’d wanted mor
e for her.

  I drove past the turn to our street with a feeling like we could keep driving, leave everything behind because we didn’t really need any of that stuff, though I would miss my chair. I could get an identical one wherever we ended up, though. I’d have the money to buy ten chairs if I wanted. I didn’t know how much my father had at the time of his death—he’d been a gambler—but even if he was dead broke there was the land; his father had left him over seven hundred acres in Pearl River County and I was the last one left to inherit it.

  “Remind me to call that son-of-a-bitch lawyer again when we get home,” I said, and then I asked her if exploring the world was something she might be interested in. I asked her why a lawyer was named Lucky, if she could tell me what kind of asshole went out into the world with that kind of name and how I’d ended up with him, though I knew how I’d ended up with him: my father’s lawyer, Mr. Veach, died after a swallowed toothpick punctured his bowels.

  I’d seen some pictures of a town—some place in Nevada—where every house was perfectly lived in and completely and forever deserted. Food still on the table and puzzles partially put together, coats hanging from the backs of chairs. I hoped that someone would find my house in ten years and wonder what had happened to me. Where I’d gone. Only I wouldn’t have years. Frank would return within a week, perhaps sooner because we didn’t get much of a visit in last time. He hadn’t been able to ask me all of the questions he felt he must in order to give himself credit for having come. If I didn’t answer the door, he’d return the following day and then he’d call Maxine. And Maxine would come over or call the police to do a welfare check.

  The dog knew we were on a great adventure. She looked out the window and sniffed the air all the way to Alabama.

  “Have you ever been to Alabama?” I asked. “I bet you haven’t. We’ll visit all fifty states, get a map and hang it on the wall and cross out one after another until we’ve seen every one. Would you like that?”

  She licked my hand, faster and faster. I wasn’t fond of my hands being licked. My face or my hands.

  “I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon myself. I believe that’s a dream most men have. I’m a sixty-three-year-old American man who’s never been to the Grand Canyon. Don’t you believe that’s a shame?”

  She nodded or was just lowering her chin to look at the floor, which was her natural position. I would get her some confidence somehow. Getting her out into the world would do that for her.

  “We’re gonna get our confidence back,” I said. “We’re gonna steal Harry Davidson’s wife and then I’ll have his dog and his wife and the three of us are going to travel the world. What do you think about that?” She seemed to think it was a fine idea, fine, fine. I counted the states I’d been to, trying to visualize them on a map. I started in the West. I’d been to California and Oregon and Nevada and that was it out there. In California I’d gone through a roadblock and they’d asked if I had any fruit. In Oregon they wouldn’t let me pump my own gas. In Nevada, I’d seen the Hoover Dam. About a hundred people died while building the dam, or was it a thousand? It hadn’t been as awesome as I’d imagined, but it was still impressive; when there were so many people gathered in one place, herded from one area to another, things weren’t as impressive. I feared the Grand Canyon would be the same way. I would have to ride a donkey down to the river in order to get the full effect and I wasn’t going to do that. In the middle of the country, there were also great swaths I’d missed. Most of it, in fact, as there had never been any reason to go to Indiana or Ohio, Nebraska or the Dakotas. I didn’t know anyone in those places. I thought I might like to know people in those places.

  I pulled into a gas station and topped off the tank, then went inside to get a beer. On the way out, I stopped to check out the sunglasses. I tried on a pair, looked at myself in the tiny mirror.

  “What do you think about these?” I asked the girl. “Do they look okay?” The tag was hanging down, obscuring my view.

  “How do they feel?” she asked. “Are they too tight, too loose?”

  “No, they fit fine. The lenses seem a bit . . . large, though.”

  She squinted and gave me a serious look. “Nope,” she said. “Not too big and not too small.” She smiled and it was a nice smile, like she was letting me know I wasn’t bothering her, or that she didn’t mind being bothered.

  I thanked her and handed her a twenty-dollar bill, didn’t look back. I would have to become more comfortable tipping people, with asking for things and accepting them. Though my grandfather had land and money and lived a rather lavish lifestyle, my father hadn’t raised us that way. He said he wanted my brother and me to live as if we wouldn’t inherit a dime.

  I supposed we’d done it, though not in the way he meant.

  The weather was excellent, sunny but a good assortment of clouds, low seventies. It was the best time of the year, early November, and the leaves were falling off the trees simply because it was time for them to fall.

  I drove back the way we’d come, feeling better than I had in a long time, as long as I could remember. There was no reason to leave everything behind, no reason at all. The house would be paid off by Christmas. There was plenty of beer in the refrigerator and money for pizzas and hamburgers, everything we needed and nobody hounding us. It was a goddamn miracle.

  CHAPTER 5

  IT WAS AFTER five o’clock and the day was done. It had been a good day, and I felt like we’d accomplished a lot, though they weren’t things you could check off a list. But we didn’t need to check things off a list anymore—we were free birds, I reminded myself. I turned on the news, to my girl Christy who was stumbling over her words in a way that made me sorry for her. She did it again, and again. What the hell was going on? The more she stumbled the worse it was, like a snowball effect, until I couldn’t take it any longer and had to change the channel.

  Layla fell asleep soon after that and began to yelp. I didn’t know if she was having a good dream or a bad one. What did dogs dream about? What were their nightmares like? I placed a hand on her until she woke up.

  I had also been asleep, I realized, because it was after seven and I’d missed dinner but I wasn’t too hungry—the hamburgers were still doing their work. I was thinking about getting myself a beer when I heard Frank’s truck pull into the driveway. Dammit, Frank. I turned off the lamp, held my breath. He knocked as he called my name through the door. “Make sure that dog doesn’t attack me again.” It was weird for someone to talk to you through a door when there wasn’t any evidence you were home. “Louis? You in there?”

  I went to the bathroom, flushed the toilet. “I’m coming!” I said, breaking into a jog. “Frank? Is that you? I was taking a piss.”

  “I brought you some dinner.” He peered in at Layla. She hadn’t moved from her spot, but she was looking up at him with her white eyebrows raised. It was funny; you couldn’t really see she had eyebrows most of the time. “She alright over there?”

  “She’s fine. She was napping.”

  “I tried something new, from someplace new—the blackened shrimp Alfredo,” he said. “It’s always a mistake.” He handed me the box—oh, how I loved the box—but it was suspiciously light. I had the urge to open it right there and frown at the pitiful offering.

  “That was nice of you.”

  “Well, I just wanted to give you that and tell you I’ll be by tomorrow for a proper visit.”

  “That’s alright. You don’t have to do that.”

  “No, I want to.”

  Once his truck pulled out of the driveway, I ate the pasta with my hands, feeding noodles to Layla as her teeth scraped lightly against my fingers. There were only two shrimp left and I cursed Frank while Layla listened, her ears pricked. After that, we went and sat in the backyard. I had one chair back there, a cheap beach chair because Ellen had taken the good ones and I hadn’t gotten around to replacing them yet. I knew I never would, same as the mattress, but I could pretend. The truth was I didn
’t care that much—so what if the chair was a bit low? It wasn’t worth making a special trip to the store, wasn’t worth the hassle of having someone come to the house to deliver stuff. Ellen had also taken the furniture from the office but I didn’t need an office anymore. Other than her personal effects, she had only wanted things that held no memories at all: patio furniture, a desk and a desktop computer, a printer/fax/copier. Some white dishes she’d purchased at Tuesday Morning. I had liked those dishes. They were heavy and thick and when you dropped them they didn’t break. She had also taken one of the TVs, a smart TV that I’d insisted she take since she’d been the one to make it do things, order it around. I refused to talk to a television set, couldn’t even turn the damn thing on.

  I watched Layla walk about the yard, sniffing and pissing in various spots, while I tried to conjure Ellen’s face, but at the moment I was only able to recall her most unattractive features. One of her ears had been smaller than the other, folded in an odd way, and she’d struggled through periods of psoriasis that got so bad her scalp felt like a topographic map, flakes coming off in great chunks. Not to mention the fact that she had some of the thickest ankles I’d ever seen on a woman. While most people considered her an attractive person, when you thought about someone by their least attractive qualities, you could make anyone into a monster. Who would believe a deform-eared, thick-ankled, psoriasis-ridden woman could also have been a class beauty? That she’d received three marriage proposals before mine?

  “You’re happier than a pig in shit,” I said. “Happier than a pig in mud.” I was doing my best to get my spirits back up after poor Christy and the sad shrimp. “A pig in a poke,” I went on. “A pig in slop. Pigs must be really happy ’cause there sure are a lot of sayings about how happy they are. Unfortunately, their lives are short and their deaths gruesome. They hang them upside down and slit their throats.” I had no idea how pigs were killed, how long their lives were or how brutal their deaths, but it was fair to assume.