by Mary Miller
“You want me to come out there today?” he asked. “I could probably come by around six, if it would help you to sleep better.”
“It would—it would help me sleep better,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want to put you out too much.”
“It’ll be okay. I can postpone that Top Chef marathon with my wife.”
“You like those cooking shows?”
“I like Top Chef best,” he said. “They’re all living together in one house so things get complicated, though not right off.”
“I’ll have to watch an episode.” Whether it was cooking or surviving in the wilderness, the main attraction was how people got along, or didn’t, with others. And it was most interesting when things went badly. I shook his hand and thanked him. After that, I drove through Burger King and bought a sack of junior bacon cheeseburgers and fries and Layla and I ate our first burgers parked in the lot. I still didn’t want to go home so I took a detour by Harry Davidson’s house, just out of curiosity. Perhaps it was Harry Davidson I was obsessed with and not his wife, after all. The idea horrified me. It also excited me. Harry Davidson, that fat bastard.
I slowed as I approached, but his truck wasn’t there. He was at work, as usual, just a normal day. A regular day even though your wife has left you and run off with another man and then burgled him and run off from him, too. I trolled, waited. I didn’t know what I wanted to happen but I wanted something to happen even if it was Harry Davidson with his fat fingers around my neck.
Layla whimpered so I tossed her another burger.
“I wish I was a dog, things would be a lot simpler if I’d been born a dog. Of course your lifespan is shit but maybe that’s all anyone really needs on this earth—fourteen, fifteen years. Seems like plenty.” I picked up her paw and kissed it and the corn chip smell overwhelmed me—it had relocated from her belly to her feet, or it had spread—and the corn chip song came back to me. I felt a world of possibility open up and then someone was grabbing my shirt. It was Kevin Hood: overly involved neighbor, God-fearing churchgoer, the kind of guy who wants a Little Kevin so he can be the big one. Just like my father.
Big Kevin did not look pleased to see me. He had his phone out and was punching the buttons very aggressively like it was a prop.
“I’m calling Harry right now,” he said. “I’m getting Harry on the phone.”
“What are you, Harry’s little bitch?”
“I’m the HOA president.”
“Well isn’t that something,” I said. “HOA president. You’re doing really great things with your life, Big Kev. Amazing things.” I took a sip of my drink to show him how unbothered I was by the whole affair, and then stepped on the gas but the car was in park so the engine revved. I put it into drive and noted that my heart was barely even beating fast. I was training myself, putting myself into challenging situations to see how I would handle them. It had been a long time—I had been a young man—since I’d really pushed myself. I called out the window for him to go fuck himself.
I drove by the gas station on the way home and picked up a twelve-pack of beer and a couple of Pepsis. Then I stopped at Walgreens because it was right there and ran in to get my medicine. There were five different bottles and I wasn’t sure which ones I was supposed to take since the new doctor had switched things up so I paid for them all. As I was pulling up to the house, the UPS man arrived with my check and I signed for it. I ripped open the envelope with the blind hope that there would somehow be more, a mistake had been made, but there was no mistake. At least Sasha hadn’t gotten her dirty hands on it.
In the kitchen, I found a notepad and made a list of the things that were missing. I didn’t want to call the police but I should call my homeowner’s insurance to see what they would cover. And my checkbook was, indeed, gone. I thought I might have to call the police since I’d reported it to the bank, but I didn’t want to call them—you called the police and they shot your dog or there was some confusion as you reached for your license because they thought you had a gun and bang! It was over. They were shooting white people now, too, or so I’d heard, and all sorts of dogs, though not small ones like Ellen’s; no one would shoot a dog that weighed ten pounds. I would like to see a cop shoot a Chihuahua or a weenie dog, some tiny thing that had bared its teeth, see how that played in the media.
I watched Naked and Afraid as we waited for the lockman to arrive, petting Layla with my foot. I hadn’t heard her gag in a while. I tried to put it out of my mind so as not to jinx it, felt sure she’d start back up any minute. Any second now she’d swallow hard and then she’d start gagging and freaking out and the gagging would resume right on schedule—four, five, six times a day until I broke. I thought about calling the Social Security office and then I thought about some other things and they led to other things until I was thinking about something I hadn’t thought about in a very long time: how my uncle had given my brother and me a baby alligator when we were young. It was a small thing but it grew very fast. It grew so fast we started keeping it in the bathtub and even though we’d raised it from infancy we had to be careful because it would try to bite us at every opportunity. Our mother had a girl of about seventeen who helped her cook and clean and we would torture her with it and then she quit and we pretended like we were glad she was gone, but I missed her and my brother did, too. What was most surprising in this memory was the fact that our parents had let us keep it at all, let it live in our bathtub for so many years. Perhaps the alligator in my memory was a lot bigger than it had actually been, and perhaps it had only been months, or weeks even, that we’d had it. I wished I could call my brother up and ask him. That was the worst thing about everyone being dead.
I woke up, startled by a knock at the door. The dog had also been snoozing. She barked once, sharp and high-pitched, on alert. I let Marvin in and Layla licked his hand: he was one more person who had won her over simply by not being Frank. I’d been dreaming of Sasha. Sasha and I had been somewhere together, doing something. I could see her on a boat, at the top of a building, waving down to me. I wasn’t going to be able to piece the dream back together with him in the house.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked, impressed with myself for thinking of it. “I’ve got beer, Pepsi, water, milk.” I did not have milk—I had half and half, but I’d been on a roll.
“Well, I’ll be off work in ten minutes,” he said. “No harm in having a beer.”
I agreed and opened myself one, too.
While the man worked, I told him about my troubles, figuring it was what folks did when he was in their living rooms, giving him a story. I started with the women in my life and the ways in which they’d wronged me. And I told him about my father, the inheritance. He was black and we didn’t know any of the same people so I could tell him anything. He was also half listening as he worked, or not even half listening, less than half. If he were around more often I might get used to talking about myself, learn how to do it without offending or alienating people.
He went out to his truck and I sat in silence for a while, not watching TV or doing anything, awaiting his return.
“I’ve been married twenty-nine years,” he said, as he continued with the job.
“Do you still like her?”
“She’s too good for me but she loves me for some reason—tells me I’m her best friend and she has a lot of friends so that must mean something.”
“That’s nice,” I said, though it didn’t answer my question. As he handed me the keys, however, he told me things. They were the kind of things I’d heard before and yet they felt remarkable: listen more than you talk, be thankful for every day, compliment the other person often, and if you have something negative to say, keep your damn mouth shut. Perhaps the remarkable thing was that someone actually followed this advice. I pictured Diane’s chin hairs. If you really liked—no, if you really loved—someone, would you let them go around with a bunch of hairs hanging off their face? Surely not. Surely you would err on the side of hurting
their feelings in order to protect them from the people who would judge them even more harshly.
He waggled his empty bottle and said he guessed it was time to go.
“You sure you won’t have one more? You’re officially off work now.”
“Well, okay then. Twist my arm.”
I got him another, got myself another. He sat on the couch and petted Layla and I introduced him to my program—a naked man and woman in the Louisiana swamps. I was surprised he’d stayed, but didn’t want to appear as though I was surprised. And he didn’t seem eager to get home to his wife, despite what he’d said about her. I could hear his phone vibrating in his pocket, see it lighting up. Dinner on the table, his wife there alone. . . . I supposed it was nice that he said kind things about her in public, regardless; it was better than saying shitty things about her and broadcasting their troubles all over town.
When Ellen and I were together, even when we’d stopped talking and lived as sullen roommates, I didn’t say anything bad about her to my colleagues or fishing buddies. We didn’t talk like that, about things like that. You asked how someone’s wife was doing and the other person said they were fine and that was the extent of it unless she’d been sick, in which case he would say she was feeling better, regardless of whether or not it was true.
“Oh, these two’ll never make it,” I said, gesturing at the TV. “I’ve gotten to where I can look at them and tell. And the primitive survival ratings are bullshit, pardon my French. I don’t know how they come up with them but they don’t make any goddamn sense. Pardon my French.”
He didn’t seem to mind my French. He commented on the man’s back hair and quietly drank his beer, one ankle resting on a knee.
I went to the kitchen and stood on my tiptoes to procure the fifth of Wild Turkey from above the refrigerator, but I couldn’t reach it so I had to climb onto the counter. As I was cursing my knees, I heard Frank’s truck pull into the driveway. I opened the door with the bottle in my hand before he had time to knock. “Come on in and have a seat—I’ve been expecting you. This is Marvin. Marvin came by to change the locks and stayed for a beer.” I was pleased to see that Marvin hadn’t moved. He was enjoying his beer and looking at Layla, the way her lips had curled up and away from her teeth at our new guest. I noticed that some of her teeth were broken and a number of them appeared to be missing altogether. Such was life for a dog like her. Who knew where she’d been, what she’d been subjected to, before she found me.
“Oh, Layla hates Frank here,” I explained. “Attacked him once—got him by the ankle and latched on, wouldn’t let go.”
“I went to Chili’s,” Frank said.
“Well, it must’ve been a special occasion. Thank you for the birthday present.”
“Oh, Louis, I forgot it was today.”
“That’s okay—I don’t remember when yours is, either. Sometime in April?”
“March,” he said. “Close enough.”
“Come on in and have a drink to celebrate.”
He couldn’t say no at that point. I took the box into the kitchen—the dog hot on my trail—and snuck a peek: chicken fajitas. I’d been hoping for a burger and fries. Or something else, I didn’t know what, but not chicken. I had a flashback of all the rotisserie chickens Ellen had tried to feed me over the years and call it dinner. She’d serve it with a can of beans or peas and some white bread stacked on a plate. What a lazy woman she’d been. I’d known it even at the beginning, which is what galled me most. I could track her laziness, her selfishness, all the way back to our very first date when she wouldn’t give me a bite of the dinner I was paying for. I fed the dog a few hardened bits and went back into the living room, still carrying the bottle of liquor like I was just going to carry it around forever.
I wanted to confront Frank about the will, how he’d known all along I’d been screwed and hadn’t said anything. Instead I offered him a shot of Wild Turkey, which he declined. He was sitting on the other side of the couch, Layla keeping a close eye on him though she’d stopped baring her teeth.
“I thought you’d given up liquor,” Frank said.
“I did, I have. But it’s a special occasion. You want a beer?”
“I’m fine. I can’t stay long.”
We continued watching the program and the man and woman weren’t getting along at all. She called him shiftless and good-for-nothing but he claimed to be saving his energy for more important things. He spent his time dozing under a tree, drinking swamp water without purifying it with the mirror the woman had brought along as her special item. Meanwhile, she sat in the sun for hours at a time, shining it into a pot she’d miraculously found on the first day. We discussed whether or not someone in the crew had planted the pot, how likely it was to find a pot in a swamp. Since I was the expert, I did most of the talking.
I went back to the kitchen and returned with three glasses of ice. Frank sighed but took one, as did Marvin.
“Did you poison it?” Frank asked, after I’d splashed the whiskey in.
“Yes, Frank, I poisoned it. The whole bottle. I always like to poison my guests.”
He set his glass down and picked it back up, eyeing me as he took a sip. He took another sip and another, and after a few minutes, a friendly mood came over the room, which was unexpected. The three of us drinking our drinks and commenting on the program—the man had been bitten by a snake—and it seemed we were all supposed to have convened like this, in these spots, like I had seen it before it happened. I couldn’t remember what that was called but there was a word for it. I wanted to get out my iPad and look it up but remembered I didn’t have my iPad anymore.
“You know they make tape for that bird banging on your window there—you hang it in the branches and they avoid the whole area,” Marvin said, moving his arm slowly across the room like someone describing a beautiful sunset. “Works two ways, they don’t like the rustle or the shine.”
“I got some,” I said. “I got a whole bag over there on the counter. I barely even hear the damn thing anymore, though. It hardly even registers.”
Marvin said he’d hang it for me at no charge because he’d had the same thing happen a while back. Maybe it was because his wife kept the windows so clean. It was a relief to hear him say he’d dealt with the same issue. I wasn’t being singled out by this bird. This bird wasn’t a bad omen or bad luck, hadn’t chosen my house in particular to torment. It was just a bird and you could hang some shiny stuff and make it go away. I thanked him but said I’d do it first thing in the morning.
“It’s something I need to do myself,” I said, as if it was really something special to walk into your own backyard and hang shit from a branch.
“You going to vote on Tuesday?” Frank asked.
“Of course I’m going to vote on Tuesday,” I said.
“What about you?” Frank asked Marvin.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I always vote.”
“Me too,” Frank said.
Stop it right there, Frank, I thought, don’t say another word. That’s a damn can of worms you don’t want to open. We went back to the program—the man was killing snakes left and right and the couple was eating pretty decently. Turned out I’d been wrong about them. When it was over, Frank stood and said he’d better be getting home to Claudia, which prompted Marvin to stand, as well. It always happened like that: one person left and then everyone went with them.
I was sorry to see them go. I picked up Layla and held her like a baby, like Sasha had done, and she didn’t try to escape so I said all of the nicest things I could think to say to her, that she was pretty and smart and kind, that she was a good dog, the best dog. My truest companion, my one and only now and forever.
CHAPTER 16
IN THE DREAM, Sasha had broken into the house. Hovering over my face so close I could feel her breath. I was frozen in place, unable to move anything except for my eyes and facial muscles, which contorted into horrible shapes as she smiled down at me. She held up a key, but in the d
ream the key didn’t look like a key but a piece of fruit. I told her I’d changed the locks and she laughed. You don’t even lock your windows, she said. This wasn’t true. I never opened any of the windows except the one in the kitchen and only when I burned something—so far as I knew, the rest of the windows had been locked since Maxine left the house. Sasha laughed again and her key was just an ordinary key, though the teeth appeared larger and sharper than usual. Wake up, she said, and I did.
I heard Layla’s tail thumping and called her onto the bed with me, rubbed her belly. The dream was nothing—Sasha hadn’t broken into the house; she hadn’t threatened me, pointed a gun at my head. She was just a woman, and a small one at that, and I felt silly for being afraid of her. For dreaming of her. The image of the fruit—a pomegranate—was stuck in my head. I saw it balanced on her palm, bright red with seeds bursting out of it. I wondered if pomegranates were in season.
“What do you think a pomegranate means?” I asked Layla. “Did your mother have a thing for those? What if she told me about it and I can’t remember? Or what if she didn’t tell me about it and I knew anyway because we have some sort of special mental connection? Do you think that’s possible?”
She jumped down and we went from room to room checking the windows. I found the one in the office unlocked as well as one in Maxine’s room. What a wily, deceitful woman! She could’ve stolen Layla right out from under my nose! I locked the windows and then went around the house double-checking just to be sure. After that, I sat on Maxine’s bed and stewed for a good ten minutes. I considered stripping the sheets, but instead found myself under the covers inhaling deeply: the smell of dust, decaying flowers. I had the terrible idea that Sasha had crept in the window and slept there, vacating the room mere moments before I opened the door. I picked a couple of hairs off the pillow and held them, not sure whether to flush them down the toilet or swallow them or drop them to the carpet. I dropped them. Considering how often I vacuumed, they might stay there forever.