It Needs to Look Like We Tried

by Todd Robert Petersen

  Despite it all, the hardest thing for him to admit was that he cared more about his personal driving record then he cared about the dog. Driving always exacts a price. Every road requires a toll. His father had said that years ago, when they’d come across a red-tailed hawk obliterated on a county road outside their home in Bushland, and Doyle wept shamefully. Power always has a cost, and the person with power is never the one who pays the fee.

  So, with a sigh, Doyle offered to bring the dog home, and the woman accepted. She gave him directions to her house, which was only five miles south of this little town at the end of another mile of dirt road. He made her repeat the directions twice, then he hung up and tied Princess awkwardly to the top of the Nissan with some old twine he kept in the trunk.

  As he pulled away from Congress, the sun was still high in the west. Other houses past the service station were just as run-down, but they hunkered closer together and didn’t look as forlorn. Doyle adjusted his lumbar support and glanced down at the empty Gatorade bottles and hamburger bags on the floor.

  On the west edge of town, he came to a four-way stop. There was still no traffic, but as he was turning off the highway, he saw someone peek over the edge of a roof. Whoever it was watched him drive through the intersection. He thought he was alone, but apparently he was wrong about that.

  Doyle had no idea how he would present Princess to her owner. When Doyle’s mother lost her teacup poodle, Mr. Buttons, it had been his brother’s fault. He had left the sliding glass door open, though they had been formally cautioned time and time again of the consequences. Mr. Buttons weaseled his way out onto the back patio and got himself killed by a rattlesnake.

  Doyle found Mr. Buttons in the backyard. The little dog was puffed up like a pool toy. A torpid snake, its jaw unhinged, was trying to swallow one of the dog’s hind legs. The whole scene was pathetic, but in a certain way, he was proud that Mr. Buttons had bought the farm with some dignity. Of course, Doyle had no idea what to say to his mother. He and Kenny were just kids and couldn’t know that a rattler would go for a poodle. Doyle was absolutely certain they could not use a direct approach. He also knew that it was Kenny’s problem, so he behaved as if nothing had happened. But that night his old man found the dog while he was cleaning the barbecue grill. Doyle saw it happen and ran downstairs to find Kenny, who was playing video games in the family room.

  All he said was, “Play dumb, man. Listen up, Kenny. You … don’t … know … anything.” When their father came downstairs with Mr. Buttons’s rhinestone-studded collar in his hand, he shook it at the boys, saying, “Mr. Buttons turned up snake bait in the backyard, and it wasn’t me who left the door open.” Doyle and Kenny looked up, blinking their innocence. “The snake’s in the freezer under some deer steaks, so your mother doesn’t have to know anything about that part of it, you hear?”

  Doyle and Kenny nodded.

  “I buried that damn curly-haired son of a bitch out in the side yard by the rosebushes where he can earn his keep.” Their old man cocked his head and eyeballed each one of them in turn. “And she doesn’t need to know about that either. Y’all better come up with something good to tell your mother, because it’s TV dinners until she’s over this.”

  Kenny started crying.

  “Oh look, the little sissy’s bawling,” their old man said, then he shifted his attention to Doyle. “See that he doesn’t mess this up. I won’t fix this any more than I already did.”

  Doyle nodded.

  Kenny shuddered when the door slammed, but he immediately started sniffing and pacing, saying, “Oh, Mama, I’m sorry about Mr. Buttons,” like an incantation that would get rid of the mistake. Kenny kept at it, moaning and thrashing across the room, rehearsing variations of his sorrow.

  After a few minutes, he bolted out of the room.

  Doyle watched from around the corner of the entryway as Kenny flailed himself like a monk and fell into his mother’s arms, begging forgiveness. At first she didn’t know what he was talking about, but eventually she pieced together “Buttons,” “door,” “Mister,” “forgot,” and “disappeared.” But Kenny was such a mess that her maternal instinct quashed her grief, and she took to stroking Kenny out of his hysterics. It was like magic. Even that young, Kenny was the Houdini of family relations.

  Doyle wondered if he could manage to bow and scrape enough like Kenny to steer away this woman’s grief. Probably not. But all he needed was a quick distraction so he could make his getaway.

  “Oh, ma’am,” he began, turning off the music so he could practice his confession, “I’m sorry about Princess. I know she must have meant the whole world to you. I can’t believe that I—she just—I don’t know what to say—it was all so … stupid.” Doyle slammed the flat of his hand against the steering wheel. “This is stupid. I am stupid,” he shouted to himself. “The fleabag was probably as rabid as a preacher anyway.” He kept on driving. The ground was littered with stone and yucca. Everything was washed-out: the sky white with heat, the clouds still threatening.

  He slowed when he turned onto the single-lane dirt road. There was only a scattering of houses in the distance, all of which looked abandoned. He kept forging on, gripping the wheel at two and ten. He turned on the radio, but getting static, he switched it back off and stared over the steering wheel. He still had no idea what he would say, and he was oblivious to the four turkey vultures falling into position behind him.

  WHEN HE PULLED UP IN front of the house, the woman was waiting for him. She sat in the shade on the top step of a rickety porch, her head wilting into her hands. She didn’t look up as he crept along the driveway, but stayed slumped, her shoulders twitching.

  Doyle parked the Nissan behind the woman’s truck, put on his game face, and got out. The woman raised her head but didn’t stand. Doyle steeled and then forced himself toward the house. The woman was not particularly old, perhaps thirty-five, maybe forty. She had Southern hair, all teased up and sprayed. Her makeup was theatrical, and she wore a denim cowboy shirt with pearly plastic snaps and half-moon cutouts right above the pockets. Her red jeans were tight through the thighs and boot cut. Doyle had seen plenty of country girls like this.

  “Mr. Mattson, that’s not …” She swallowed hard. “… up there, is it?” she asked, covering her mouth with one hand. Doyle nodded, then went to the back of his car and began to untie the dog. The car trip and the coagulating blood had pulled the skin on Princess’s lip back into a snarl. Her fur had stiffened and separated into gills.

  “Ma’am, I’ll get her down right away,” Doyle said, tugging at the mess of rope. The knots were tight, and he was having some trouble getting them undone. Doyle fooled with the twine for a while, then, exhausted by the process, took out his Swiss Army knife and cut the cord free. He put the knife back and took the dog by her collar and slid her off the roof with his hand under the rump. He brought Princess to the step just below the woman’s feet, set the body down, and stepped over to the rail. The woman’s perfume stung his throat.

  Quietly, she leaned over.

  “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I was just on my way to my dad’s wedding in Santa Barbara, and she just came at me out of nowhere. I didn’t have …”

  The woman crouched and quietly smoothed down the dog’s ear with a hand that was capped with perfectly manicured red fingernails. Doyle waited for the woman to burst out crying, but she didn’t. She just kept cursing over and over while she stroked its ear.

  “Ma’am,” Doyle said.

  She looked up. He expected mascara to be everywhere, but she looked fine.

  “Ma’am. Princess ran right out in front of me. I didn’t see her. If I had, it would be a different story, honest. It was just, smack, like that, and the next thing I knew, I’d hit her. I’m sorry, I’m so …”

  The woman looked at Doyle’s car, then sized him up, flipped her hair, and managed a smile. “There’s a lot of sons a bitches in this world, Mr. Mattson, who would have kept on driving.”

  Doyle was s
urprised, which made him want to look away. When he eventually met her gaze, the woman was nodding and staring him right in the eyes, her lashes caked in mascara.

  “Mr. Mattson,” she said, “I have to say that I am proud to know you. You had every reason in the world to keep going and make it to that wedding, but you didn’t.”

  Doyle scratched his head and looked at his feet. “Ma’am?” he asked.

  “That’s enough. We both know you could have drove off, but you didn’t. Something blew you my way.”

  She looked at him like she knew something about him. Something he was just about to discover on his own.

  “Since you’re here,” she said, smiling, “do you think you could—if it’s not too much trouble—do you think you could … help … me bury Princess? Doc would want her close to … the house. I’m mostly alone these days. And no good with tools.” She drew a deep breath and let it sigh out dramatically. “You know how it is.”

  Oh Lord, Doyle thought, trying not to bug his eyes out in surprise. He stared down without trying to seem like he was looking away, and he saw the woman stroking the dog’s fur with the knuckle of her forefinger.

  The “old inch and mile” is how his old man put it. “Never agree with a woman,” he used to say. “You can do what she wants—in the long run it’s less trouble for you to do it that way in the first place—but you can’t agree with her, not out loud.”

  “Ma’am,” he said before he could stop himself.

  “Quit it,” she said.

  In his mind, he had taken himself by the shirt collar and the seat of his pants and was carrying himself toward the Nissan, but the Eagle Scout inside him said: “Show me where to take her.”

  The woman rose, smoothing out her jeans, pressing her painted lips together and peeling them apart. “Mr. Mattson,” she said, “would you please call me CJ?” She grinned slightly and winked at him. “All this ma’aming makes me sound like somebody’s mother.”

  “Well, you’re certainly not my mother,” Doyle replied.

  “That is the truth in almost every way you can think about it.”

  “Okay then, CJ,” he said, reluctantly. “Where does your dog go?”

  “It’s not my dog,” she said.

  Doyle froze, with a weird look on his face and one eyebrow cocked.

  “It belonged to my husband,” she said. “And now we’re free—now she’s free from the troubles of this world,” she said, placing a hand on her stomach. “There’s a shovel against the back door. I’ll be out in a tick to show you where you can put that thing to rest.”

  THE BACKYARD WAS MOSTLY DIRT and cinders. Three or four cottonwood trees grew in a circle around the area directly behind the house, but it was not much of a place anyone in their right mind would call a yard, not the kind of place anyone with good sense would choose to live. Out where the dirt stopped, desert grass started toward the Mojave in loose tan bunches. In the distance, Doyle could see dark tongues of rain lolling here and there in the wind. To his left, an old, badly painted barn leaned west with its doors half open. Inside was the unblinking passenger’s-side headlight of a broken-down International Harvester pickup and some large plastic-covered hoops dangling from the rafters.

  Doyle set Princess down and wondered what CJ did with herself this far into the middle of nowhere. He knew people got stuck, and home is home no matter how ugly it is. Doyle surveyed the yard again, shaking his head. He shuddered, then his eye fell on another fly that had homed in on Princess and was buzzing around her head. Poor dog, he thought to himself, wondering how long before the coyotes would skulk in from the scrub and scratch her carcass out of the ground. Wasted work.

  “Mr. Mattson,” CJ called out.

  Doyle jumped so sharply that he tripped over Princess and fell to the ground. The fly buzzed a quick lap around the three of them, then landed again on the dog’s face. Doyle looked up at CJ, who was carrying a tall glass of iced tea.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Doyle said. “Sorry again, about all this.”

  “Nonsense, a whole lot of business got itself resolved today. You think you might want a little something,” she said, wiping condensation from the glass tumbler with a folded dish towel, “what with all this thirsty work I’ve tricked you into.” She smiled. Her teeth were so perfectly aligned that, for a second, Doyle thought she might be wearing dentures.

  “I haven’t really started, but a little something sounds nice,” he said, climbing to his feet. He took the glass and dragged it across his forehead, then drank the sweet tea until the ice clinked against his teeth and the glass was empty. The cold made his teeth ache.

  “Wow,” CJ said, taking the glass from him. “I’ll have to go back inside and fill this up again.” When she said it, she took the glass and ran the bottom edge of it along the bare skin inside the half-moon cutouts of her cowboy blouse. Doyle watched as she continued to run the glass back and forth until the fabric darkened from the condensation. He looked away before anything else came up.

  Her words from before sunk into the base of his skull as if shot from a bow: “I’m mostly alone these days. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. Where should I dig?” he asked.

  She walked over to a spot away from the house and traced a rectangle with her boot heel. Then, as suddenly as she’d appeared, she spun around and sashayed back into the house. Doyle blinked for a while at the spot where CJ had been standing, then he shook his head.

  DOYLE’S WORK CREPT ALONG. EVERY third stroke Doyle would knock the shovel blade against another stone, stop, forearm another ounce of sweat from his brow, then pry the stone out by digging under it and leaning on the shovel’s handle until the rock popped out of place, which he would then heft into the weeds. Then he’d start digging again. At this pace, it took him the better part of an hour to chip a hole that was just deep enough for the task. When he finished, Doyle set Princess mechanically into the grave and began shoveling the orange dirt on top of her body.

  As the dirt puffed lightly on the dog’s fur, Doyle felt a strange swimming in his throat, and he thought for a moment that he might have been poisoned. All he wanted was to finish and get in his car and get back on the interstate. All the cars would be headed in the same direction. There would be Shell stations and truck stops full of beer and Dr Pepper and pay phones. He could call the motel in Santa Barbara and let his father and his fiancée know he was a little bit off schedule, but not to worry. He’d make the rehearsal in time. Nothing would be ruined.

  He’d get a Whopper and double the fries and soak into the soothing sameness of I-10. He’d go back to the playlist and pick up where he left off, and he’d wait for the Milky Way to materialize somewhere between Blythe and Indio. He’d be able to see it fine from behind the wheel.

  But as the loose soil settled in around the dog’s profile, he began to postulate about the afterlife and consider karma, his and the dog’s. Could a right action correct a wrong action, or were all deeds written indelibly into the past? Did they just stack up and pass away forever, turtles all the way down? Above his head, an insect started buzzing. As he tossed in the last shovel of earth, Doyle wondered if the occasion didn’t require some kind of ceremony. Then he instantly regretted the thought.

  WHEN DOYLE’S MOTHER DIED, FAMILY flocked to Texas from as far away as West Virginia. She’d been struck with breast cancer that leached into her lungs and esophagus. The treatments were severe, and her death came quickly. Doyle was sixteen and had been a licensed driver for only a month when she passed away. As the family called with their itineraries, his father instructed him to run shuttle trips to the airport in Amarillo: seven trips that day, and three of them in the dark.

  “Why, Doyle,” they’d say clutching him to their breasts, “where’s your daddy at?”

  “At home,” he’d say back to them.

  “Poor man,” they’d say, “too broke up to even drive into town. Maybe we should rent a cab.”

 
; “I can drive,” Doyle said, holding up the car keys. “Got a ninety-three on my test. The man said I was an impeccable driver. Told me that to my face.”

  This made the relatives cry again, right in the terminal with passengers struggling to get past them with their luggage and squabbling children. Doyle would point and start to say something about letting people by, but they would grab him up again and crush him and call him a good boy, stroking his hair. By the seventh trip, the back of his head was slicked like a greaser’s. Doyle never squirmed or complained about the treatment, because, even at sixteen, he took his family’s grief like a man, without flinching.

  At the funeral, Doyle sat quietly in the front row of folding chairs in the funeral home. People knew his mother was sick, and Doyle himself was glad she had passed on. He knew he’d miss her, but even then, he knew that living and dying weren’t ultimately in his control. Maybe if I leave God’s business to Him, he hoped, He’ll leave me to mine. It never occurred to him to think otherwise.

  After the pastor said his piece and Doyle’s father said his, the relatives began filing past the open coffin, clutching handkerchiefs. They were all crying and snuffling. He thought their behavior was just to prove that they felt bad, but when a hand would linger on the frilled edge of the coffin lining, or when he could see one of his uncle’s beer bellies tremble with grief, it would occur to Doyle that perhaps he had the wrong idea, that maybe he should be crying, too, that somehow his reservation to do so meant that he did not love his mother as much as it was possible to love. Even his brother was crying, dragging his arm across his cheek to mop up the tears, and it was real this time. But Doyle didn’t feel like that. He couldn’t manage it. As the line of weeping relatives swept past him, he wondered if there wasn’t something monstrously wrong with him.

  Finally, the line dwindled. Doyle had been hanging his head and didn’t notice that the room was mostly empty until his father “pssst”ed in his ear and pushed him out of his chair toward the casket. His mother lay still, with her arms crossed over her chest just as Doyle would have expected her to be, but her lips seemed as if they were drawn too tightly together. They were thinner than normal and strange to look at, like two caterpillars stretched across the teeth. Doyle glanced back over his shoulder and his father was hugging some woman. Seeing that it was clear, Doyle carefully poked at his mother’s lips. They were cold and tight, and as he tried to lift the top lip, he discovered that they were sewn shut.