Biloxi

by Mary Miller

  “That was me,” I said. “You saw me do it. Watch again.”

  She looked back and forth from me to the door like she didn’t understand why I wasn’t opening it, gagging all the while. “You’re lucky I’m not the type to kick a dog because you would be a prime candidate for kicking if I were the type. Which I repeat I’m not. You don’t have to worry.” She looked worried, though, so I petted her until she quieted and then let her lick peanut butter off my fingers.

  An hour later, we were in the car. I’d dressed myself in a pair of slacks and a shirt and tie, though everything seemed to have shrunk. I’d forgotten how uncomfortable the whole getup was, and wondered how I’d done it for so many years, but I had to look presentable for Sasha. Like someone she could open the door for and allow inside. I had the pamphlets in a black briefcase and, along with the clothes, felt like I was in disguise. I needed a mustache—no, a mustache would be too much. A hat might be nice.

  Layla sat shotgun, sniffing out the window as we cruised along the beach on a mild and sunny morning.

  A couple of bozos on the radio were talking about their Second Amendment rights, how we should all be stockpiling magazines. They were so angry I could practically see the veins popping out of their necks. I didn’t think anyone was going to take away my guns—nobody was threatening to do that and never had—and yet they were getting me all fired up about it so I had to turn it off. I tried to bring myself down by imagining the nice cool living room of Sasha Davidson. Sasha in her black bra and panties, painting her toenails as I perched on the edge of a chair with a beer in hand. Fire-engine red, cherry. If only she would let me paint them. What I would give.

  It was after 10:30 but I swung by McDonald’s for a small coffee and a sack of Egg McMuffins to celebrate the all-day breakfast phenomenon that was still going strong, tossing pieces of Canadian bacon to the dog as we drove. Eventually, I’d have to learn how to cook a few more things, or at least buy some multivitamins. When was the last time I’d had a vegetable or a piece of fruit?

  “Goddammit,” I said, as a hunk of cheese and egg slid out of a muffin and onto my shirt, coming to a stop at my crotch. Layla made a pass at my pants and I jerked the wheel, the car crossing into the other lane. There was an extended honk and I righted the wheel just in time to miss a FedEx truck, the driver’s leg hanging out of it. He craned his neck and honked a few more times for good measure but I didn’t look because it was my fault and I never looked when it was my fault. You could only wave like you were sorry, or else give them the finger and act as though they’d been the one in the wrong, which might piss them off and escalate the situation further, and I wasn’t in the mood for either.

  I pulled up in front of Harry Davidson’s house—small blue car, no truck—and it struck me that someone going door to door trying to convert a person wouldn’t pull right up to their house, but then again they had to park somewhere. They were always on foot or bicycles and I was flubbing it from the get-go but it was too late to park down the street and walk.

  “What do you think, Layla?” I asked, assessing the amount of sweat visible through my shirt. Add the sweating to the grease stains and the too-snug shirt and pants and it all seemed like a failure, like a great big failure that could only go badly and might possibly get me arrested. At the very least, I would be humiliated.

  “Shit,” I said. “Shit.” I said it a few more times and then I took my briefcase out of the back seat and walked—no, I strided, I strode—up the sidewalk.

  A big plop of bird crap fell beside me as I climbed the two steps to the door.

  I knocked and waited, avoided peering into the wavy side windows like a creep. I nearly always felt like a creep or a delinquent when alone in public. Whenever I went into a liquor store, I acted as sober as possible, even though I generally was sober, or sober enough. It was like I thought they would assume I was drunk and I wanted to prove I was just a person who happened to have a reasonable amount to drink on occasion. Or I was having a party, a small get-together in which upstanding citizens might have a cocktail on a Saturday night.

  - - -

  I heard footsteps and then the door opened and Sasha was standing there. She wasn’t wearing her blue-jean shorts but a blue-jean skirt—she loved her jeans. Her hair was still in the ponytail, though. It was strange to see her up close. Her eyes were a surprising bluish-gray color—like a thunderstorm, but also kind of greenish, like it was gonna be a bad one. I had to stop myself from saying her name.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m—.” I paused. Would Harry Davidson have told her my name? Surely not. “—Louis McDonald, Jr., and I’m a member of Grace Memorial Baptist Church. Do you have a minute to speak with me?”

  “My husband and I already have a church home,” she said.

  “Have you been saved?”

  “Yes, of course I’ve been saved.”

  I didn’t know what to say after that. Jesus, it was hot out and I clearly hadn’t thought far enough ahead. I would ask if she’d been saved—that was my opener—and she would say she had and then what? There was nothing to say after that because I was supposed to be converting people and saving their souls and hers didn’t need saving so I should move on to the next one.

  I mumbled something about praying together and went for the pamphlets, raising a knee to prop up my briefcase. I nearly spilled the pamphlets everywhere but recovered.

  “I thought for sure you’d lose them,” she said.

  “You and me both. I’m new to this whole thing—not the Christian part but the saving-people part. I’m trying to become a deacon,” I added, but then thought that was the wrong denomination. Deacons were Episcopalian or Catholic. Oh, boy, I was really flubbing it. She was going to call the police any minute and have me carried away in handcuffs. There’s a real pervert here with a bunch of stolen religious pamphlets claiming he wants to save me. . . . Parked right in front of my house. That’s right, a Baptist deacon, that’s what he said. . . .

  And just like that we were standing there smiling at each other. I could tell only one side of my face was doing it so I tried to get the other side on board as quickly as possible and then I could feel my whole face doing it and I couldn’t help but look back at Layla. She was frantic, pawing the window and panting with her mouth open like a goddamn lunatic. Oh shit.

  “That’s Katy,” Sasha said, and then she was screaming “Katy! Katy!” as she ran to my car and opened the door and Layla hopped out and jumped all over her and barked and barked. My God, that dog could bark! And then she was crying and Layla was whimpering and they fell onto the grass holding each other. It was one of the most touching things I’d ever witnessed except that this was all going horribly wrong—horribly, horribly wrong. I was nearly bowled over by the depth, by the sheer impossible depth of my stupidity. If I hadn’t done it myself I would’ve said people as stupid as I am should be killed off, should be barred from procreating at the very least.

  When I walked over to them, Layla seemed torn. She licked my pants and then she went back to Sasha who was in the grass with her legs going every which way, her blue-jean skirt hiked all the way up. If I looked—I wasn’t going to look—I probably could’ve seen her panties. And then I did. They were yellow.

  “Who the hell are you and why do you have my dog?”

  “Layla,” I said.

  “No, this is Katy.”

  The dog was Katy and Harry Davidson had stuck some balloons and a sign on his mailbox and given her away while Sasha was out of the house. But it didn’t really make sense. There were neighbors who would’ve seen the sign, people passing by, but perhaps there’d just been me and it had all happened so quickly no one had been the wiser. It was an unlikely story and yet it was clear that he had given away his wife’s dog without her knowledge.

  “She ran away last week. Where’d you find her? She should’ve had a collar on with all her information and everything.” Layla was still whimpering and Sasha’s back was sort of heaving up and down as she
tried to catch her breath. She looked up at me with a horrible face, one that reminded me of the girl at the pet store and my daughter caught sneaking out her bedroom window; so many women had looked at me this way and often I didn’t deserve it, but this time was different. I considered grabbing the dog and running to my car, driving off before she could stop us. She didn’t have my license plate and had never seen me before and there’d be no reason that she ever would again, but my feet wouldn’t move.

  “She didn’t run away,” I said, adding that I was just as confused as she was.

  “You pull up to my house and knock on my door asking if I’ve been saved and you have my dog in your car? My dog. In your car. Who are you? Just who the hell are you?” She stood at this point and shoved me with one finger. The nail was long and pearly as a seashell, perfect. It didn’t match the rest of her at all. Her nails should’ve been bitten and chipped, the polish garish. I wanted both of them—if I couldn’t have them both I would never have anything.

  “Listen,” I said. “Is your husband coming home anytime soon?”

  “You know my husband?”

  “Yes, will Harry be home?”

  “How do you know Harry?”

  “I want to explain everything but I’m having trouble with my words,” I said. Trouble with my words! What a thing to say. I was also having trouble catching my breath. It was my heart. I was having a heart attack. I had been expecting it for years and it was finally happening. My heart was failing me. I would keel over in her yard and she’d have to deal with it. I distracted myself from my impending death with the mascara running down her face in streaks. Ellen had never worn mascara. When she cried there was never black stuff on her face.

  “Look,” I said. “Here’s what happened,” and I started at the beginning, with seeing my ex-wife’s car and the detour I’d taken along the beach, and to my surprise she let me talk. I told her I lived by myself and didn’t know how lonely I’d been until Harry Davidson gave me this dog, this dog he called Layla, claiming he had fourteen or some such in total. I paused to see what she’d say. She blinked and wiped the black stuff with the palm of her hand but her tears kept coming and the black stuff came with it. She was not a beautiful woman—up close I could see that her eyes were too far apart and there were a lot of wrinkles on her forehead and around her mouth and the skin on her neck was loose. I wanted to know her age, how she came to be an old woman in the body of a young one. Her breasts were perky, her legs smooth and shapely and nicely tanned, marred only by that lovely scar. It looked like someone had taken a hot poker and dragged it down her side.

  “Goddamn that son of a bitch, Harry. I knew he was lying, goddamn him.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “He wouldn’t help me put up flyers, for one. And he told me Katy was dead and I asked how he knew and he said one of the neighbors said they’d seen a dog that looked like her on the side of the road so I’d asked him which road but he made some excuse, like he didn’t want me to have to see that, acting like he gave a shit but of course there was no dead dog on the side of the road because he’d given her away.” And then she started bawling, out-and-out bawling. I looked around to see if any of her neighbors were watching us.

  “Why would he do that to you?” I asked.

  “He hated her.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I let her sleep in the bed with us at night and he didn’t like that. And I’m sure you’ve noticed the shedding,” she said, and she hugged the dog’s neck, which looked very uncomfortable, but Layla licked and licked and continued to whine in excitement.

  “And the gagging.”

  “Yes, that too. Harry couldn’t handle the gagging.”

  I sat with them on the grass and Sasha let me pet the dog, too. She’d stopped crying but she still had the black streaks and I thought about all the times I’d seen women I loved cry. Each time it happened it could never break you like it had the first time, and it became less and less effective until, at some point it, it was as horrible and ugly as it looked. When Ellen and I were learning to hate each other, she’d cried a lot, once or twice a week. How to care after a certain point?

  She stood and said, “Come inside.”

  My first impulse was to say no. I looked up and down the street for Kevin Hood, for old ladies peering from behind their curtains. I knew how old people were and this was the kind of neighborhood that was full of them. But it was also the kind of neighborhood where a man could put up some balloons and give away his wife’s dog with no one the wiser.

  The three of us went inside, Layla bounding up the steps and going straight for the L-shaped couch, where she curled up on one end waiting for Sasha to join her. I hung back in the kitchen. The house was cluttered, the counters full of dishes and appliances and stacks of newspapers, bottles and cans, bills, magazines, seven or eight boxes of cereal. There were vases and jars of flowers spread about and most of the flowers were in various stages of dying. I’d imagined it exactly, except for the flowers and cereal.

  “Harry brings me all the flowers,” she said. “He picks them from the side of the road half the time, I think, or from other people’s yards. That fat bastard. When I ask where he gets them he says, ‘the gettin’ place.’ Can I get you something to drink?”

  “What do you have?”

  She opened the refrigerator and stood there until it started beeping. “I have lemonade?”

  I didn’t care much for lemonade but agreed. She poured two glasses and directed me to the rocking chair, where I sat, and she sat next to the dog and they continued their reunion while Layla shot me side-eye glances like what we’d had had been very nice but it had been a casual sort of thing, of course it wasn’t meant to last, I shouldn’t be surprised, she was sorry if she’d led me on. I had been there for her, though, and she appreciated it despite how little I’d actually meant to her. I was reading too much into it, but she really did seem to be trying to convey these things to me: her indifference along with her appreciation and an apology. Already she was less and less like Layla, which had never been her name but a story that Harry Davidson had been dying to tell about George Harrison.

  I’d never seen the dog so happy. She’d spent most of her time with me sleeping or licking my feet in what I now saw was a highly depressed manner. This was Sasha’s dog, not mine, and I would leave without her. I told myself this a few more times to make sure it hurt.

  “When Harry comes home, what do you think he’ll do?”

  “Oh, I tell you what he’ll do—he’ll pack his shit and get out,” she said. Then she turned to the dog and called her mama’s sweet little baby, asked if she wanted a turkey treat. Layla bounded off the couch and they went to the refrigerator where Sasha lowered each piece into her mouth one at a time. No wonder the dog couldn’t catch. I thought about the discs of bologna I’d flung into the air. Which did she prefer? I wished I could ask her.

  I drank my lemonade, which was too sour and made the insides of my cheeks pucker. “I’ve been feeding her bologna, for the most part,” I said. “She really seems to like it.”

  “I’ve never given her bologna before. I guess ’cause I don’t eat it. My dad used to make bologna sandwiches when he went fishing, though, and it brings back fond memories.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I mean that’s the only time I ever really eat them. Or it’s the only time I like them.” I wondered if her father and I might go fishing, if he was still alive.

  “Are you hungry? It’s the good deli turkey.”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I said, impressed with my politeness. “I saw something in the news the other day about these two Piggly Wiggly employees who refused to serve a cop some deli meat because he was in uniform. Did you see that? They just flat-out refused.”

  “No,” she said, “I missed that, but everyone deserves deli meat. This is America.”

  “That’s what I think.” It was highly possible she was drunk or on drugs. I wasn’t usually good at picking
up on that kind of thing but she seemed loopy, beyond the normal loopiness. The way she’d sat in the grass with her skirt hiked up—that wasn’t normal. And her shirt was too big and kept slipping off one shoulder, or maybe it was supposed to do that. That was the style. I’d noticed women had started to wear shirts with holes in them to show off portions of their shoulders and arms. Mostly fat women.

  “Do you think you’d really leave him?”

  “No, I told you, he’s going to leave me,” she said, settling herself back onto the couch. “I like this house. Katy and I are happy here and I’ve been working on an herb garden out back. I’ve got mint and rosemary so far.”

  I doubted this was true, though I didn’t know why. Anyone could have a few herbs in a pot. But if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that this was Harry Davidson’s house and had always been Harry Davidson’s house. Sasha probably hadn’t lived in it more than six months. She buried her face in the dog’s neck and the crying started again. I felt like some kind of pervert, a voyeur. I had always liked that word—voyeur. I said it to myself a few times, mouthing it to see what it felt like.

  “I still don’t understand,” she said. “Harry gave you the dog and you like the dog, but you came back. Why’d you do that?”

  There was a way to explain it, I was sure, that didn’t make me sound crazy. “I guess, looking back on it, I knew something wasn’t right. Harry told me he had fourteen dogs he had to get rid of and he only let me see this one. And he mentioned you, said ‘his new wife’ was allergic and that’s why he couldn’t keep them. And you weren’t around so I wondered where you were, if he’d made you up. To be completely honest, I wanted to know what kind of woman would marry a man like that.” I paused to see what her face was doing—both of her eyebrows were raised, her eyes wide—like she was telling me to keep going. “And then I drove by a few days later because I wanted to see if the balloons were still there, if he’d gotten rid of the rest of the dogs. I was trying to figure out what was going on, I guess, if he’d even had any other dogs, but I couldn’t just knock on the door and ask so I decided to pretend I was a proselytizer.” I paused again and said, “I guess I have a lot of time on my hands right now—too much time. I retired not long ago and my father died and my wife left me. Though not in that order.”