Precious shrieked and clutched at the kitchen counter to steady herself, while Riccardo brayed a sickly growl and staggered up before imploding in a pile of dog joint and fur on the kitchen floor.
Mistress Lucy beamed at the excitement.
What they were witnessing, Mistress Lucy declared as she sashayed around the kitchen like the Queen of Sheba, was the only moral mink coat in the world. Here she paused, giving Mannish the opportunity to express his shock by shamming hyperventilation.
Every animal from which the coat had been made, continued the mistress, had been hand-butchered by God.
Precious squawked, “God is nobody’s butcher, Mistress Lucy! Burn me to de stake, but I still maintain as much.”
Mistress Lucy said nobody was going to burn anybody to the stake this morning, thank you. The phrase only meant that no pelt in the coat had been removed until the mink had suffered freely visited organic death. And before the pelt was removed, an autopsy was conducted to determine that the animal had been felled by such God-given disease as wholesome heart attack or natural stroke. The coat came with miniaturized death certificates signed by a veterinarian certifying that it was made of one hundred percent organic-death pelts, all profits being recycled to provide an Edenic environment for future mink generations. What could be more humane? And with God being the sole butcher …
“Mistress Lucy!” Precious protested. “Almighty God is no butcher!”
“So if man isn’t killing the mink, who is?” Mistress Lucy asked, toying with her maid.
“Nature, mum.”
“And who do Christians say made nature?”
“De devil, mum. De coat is a demon coat.”
The mistress glared at Precious with contempt and ordered Mannish to call and arrange for her jet plane to be ready to leave that morning. She was personally going to tour this breakthrough mink farm in North Dakota and see for herself how it was managed, for it was simply too utopian to be believed. If-she liked what she saw, she intended to buy it.
With that she scooped up Riccardo and stalked out of the kitchen.
Mannish exhaled wearily. “Precious, why must you always crush another soul’s happiness?”
“What a way you catch you breath all of a sudden!” Precious rejoined sarcastically.
“I must have a place to live while I am awaiting Beulah,” Mannish mumbled apologetically. “It will not be easy for me later, atoning for the stolen camels.”
“Praise God I soon depart from dis madhouse!”
So the mistress went away to North Dakota, leaving behind an ailing Riccardo even though Precious tried to inveigle her into taking the dog along on the trip. But the mistress said no, she did not want to take a chance on hurting Riccardo, whom she kissed full on the mouth before she flounced out of the room bawling for Mannish to come and carry her luggage. Then she was gone and Precious was left ogling the dog sprawled on his mistress’s bed.
“You better not trouble me while de mistress is away,” Precious warned the animal, aiming a stern finger at his head.
The dog stirred, looked up at her with rheumy eyes, and blew bad breath all over her finger.
And things went well that first day, for Riccardo was still groggy from the medicine. Precious ushered him through a halfhearted turn around his favorite hydrants and fed him an early supper. Then she turned down his capacious bed and the dog jumped onto it, curled up in its middle, and fell quickly asleep.
But by two days later, the dog had become frisky again. Twice on the second day of the mistress’s absence he treed Precious on the breakfast table with his aggressive wooing.
The mistress called repeatedly, inquiring if Riccardo was well, and one time Precious had to bring the dog to the telephone so the mistress could coax him into giving her a bedtime bark.
After that telephone call, Precious managed to entice the dog into his bedroom early in the evening and hurriedly slam the door on him, causing the brute to begin an impassioned howling that jangled her nerves and made her hands shake. Mannish suggested that they go out in the Rolls Royce and have dinner, leaving the beast to howl himself to death.
They had wine. They shared deep talk. They chatted about the mistress and her eccentric ways. They drove home languidly in the Rolls Royce. And when they got back to the darkened mansion they heard howls still bellowing in the mansion’s darkened rooms, rattling throughout the emptiness of the house with a ghoulish hollowness. It would be impossible for her to sleep with such a racket, Mannish said, she should come and stay in his quarters above the garage, where no dog howling could reach her ears.
Precious was reluctant at first, for she did not wish to pass the whole night with a man to whom she was not married, but eventually the dog howling upset her nerves so much that she followed the chauffeur into his quarters, where he promptly began to beg her a grind.
She hesitated, confessing that she was getting tired of giving grind to a sinner. It would be all right if she felt that he had prospects of salvation, but she thought it improper to be constantly giving grind to a man who had never been baptized. Mannish swore fervently that he was prepared to repent and convert on the spot. Precious said that he shouldn’t make a joke of it because that would only make the fire hotter, but Mannish assured her that he was not joking.
One thing led to another, and after Mannish had endured some more chastening talk about his disbelieving ways, he ended up naked atop her belly. Once he had settled there she promptly forgot religion and set about the worldly task of reducing him to the usual dribbling nub. He fell asleep at her side, his lips nibbling idly on her right nipple.
She was going to box him for this, but she held her hand. It-was needless, this nibbling, which to Precious’s thinking meant that it was most likely a sin. A pre-grind nibble was workmanlike and necessary; but a post-grind nibble was a hoggish wallowing. However, for the time being, since Mannish was still unsaved, she would permit him to nibble sleepily at her nipple, thinking with a grim sniff that he had better enjoy it now because his nibbling days were numbered.
She had had a change of heart and had decided that she would not quit the mansion. She would remain and suffer lewd dog courtship for the sake of her lover. Under her watchful eye Mannish would be born again, and she would personally save his soul. There would be no backsliding, either, for once she saved a soul it stayed saved.
She was dreamily thinking of the regimen she intended to put him under when she fell asleep.
Sometime later that night Precious awoke on Mannish’s bed to the noise of an unearthly snoring that her ears could not believe blew out the small nosehole of a Coolie. It sounded like two-baby mules were stuffed up his nostrils with each trying to out-snort the other, using nosehole as a makeshift echo chamber. She elbowed Mannish onto his side and the left mule stopped its snorting while the right one sounded an ugly bray of undeserved victory.
Precious raised herself on her elbow to look out the open window above the bed at a clear and cloudless night sky with metallic yellow light purling through the crescent slit of a new moon. The air was brisk and sweet with nighttime scents and starlight sparkle, and through the window she could see the darkened sweep and breadth of the mansion’s gardens shimmering in the night breeze. She could not sleep beside a man who made such atrocious noises, so she fumbled with a sigh for her clothes that he had considerately removed and neatly folded in a tidy cocoon at the foot of the bed.
Frock was there, wrapped protectively around slip and brassiere. Burrowed deep inside the pile were her fallen panties. She stood up beside the bed, intending to dress, and glanced curiously at the night sky.
That was when an idea stunned her: Why bother dress?
Precious had been living in a mansion now for nearly a year and had yet to walk naked among its arrayed splendors. She had not walked naked through the front yard, the backyard, the side yard with its ornamental rose gardens and flagstone paths. She had never walked naked through the corpulently furnished living room, the sinewy
picture-lined hallways, the dining room crammed with the formal props and implements of decorative gluttony.
Now it was true, and Precious grasped this immediately, that no one in Jamaica upon learning of her life in an American mansion would ever pass a catty remark about her fainthearted failure to walk naked through a mansion’s drawing room when she had had the chance. And it was also true that she herself would never boast even to relatives that hers was the only batty in the family to have ever strolled bare through a mansion.
Yet the idea of standing, of walking, or perhaps even performing a languid ballerina pirouette naked inside a mansion was one she found so utterly exciting that it made her shiver.
Years later, when she looked back on this moment, Precious would wonder how a woman of her upbringing could have fallen prey to such a depraved thought, and the only sensible explanation she could give was that the human heart was a cave hung with dark, upside-down impulses. One had taken wing and flown into her brain while her senses were still under the spell of that false prophet, hood.
Before her better nature could take arms against this impure whim, she had collected her clothes, tiptoed through the dark room, and stepped ecstatically out the door and into the nighttime coolness.
She stood naked on the top of the stairs, drew an exhilarating breath, and surveyed the darkened land shimmering under the waxy light dripping from the chinky new moon. The nighttime air trickled over her batty and poured a moist coolness into every body crack. Darkness daubed damply at her breasts, and the moment held a raw deliciousness that made her tingle.
Carefully, looking warily at every step, she made her way down the stairs and padded across the brick surface of the backyard and into the house. She entered through the kitchen door, closed it softly behind her with a furtive click, and poised there swaddled in the household shadows.
One deep cleansing breath, and she had ghosted into the drawing room, and slowly, majestically—or so she fantasized—was executing a pirouette of triumph beside an ornate coffee table when suddenly a stumpy shadow lurched out from under the banquet table and a tongue stabbed deep into her batty crack, greasing it with oily mouthwater.
Precious shrieked, for she had a delirious sense that the coffee table had slimed her with a netherworld nighttime tongue. She jumped backwards in the darkness with a second cry of horror answered by an implacable growl and the fierce grip of her legs between hairy tentacles.
“Riccardo!” Precious screamed, dimly understanding. “Stop it! How you get out? Leggo me foot!”
She bolted down the hallway, tripped on the edge of an Oriental rug, and sprawled facedown on the floor. With a frenzied growl, the dog sprang atop her fleshy buttocks and began pumping, and she felt some hideously slimy puncheon ice-picking dimples into her batty cheeks. She rolled over on her back, flailing with her arms and legs at the thrusting, probing, licking animal whose turgid belly drummed with a ravenous growling.
“Help! Murder! Police!” Precious bawled. “Dog grind!”
Screaming, she wedged her leg under the pulsating underbelly of the snarling beast and, giving a mighty heave, shot him spinning toward the ceiling as from a catapult.
She did not hear him fall or thud, but suddenly the room pulsed with only the rasp of her own convulsed wheezing.
She scrambled to her feet and fled down the hall. Then she stopped to breathlessly listen, darted down the hallway through the elegant drawing room, and sprinted out into the backyard and up the stairs above the garage. She scrambled to Mannish’s bedside, hysterically slapping at the chauffeur and shaking him awake.
Mannish sat up groggily, while she babbled incoherently about “attempted dog grind.” He tumbled after her down the rattling stairs and into the living room, which he blasted with a garish overhead light and, while Precious shielded her eyes and blubbered at him to protect her from dog rape, stalked cautiously over to a far corner of the room.
He strolled calmly to her side. “Precious,” he exploded in a gleeful laugh. “The beast is dead! Thanks be to Krishna!”
He added the observation, almost as a polite filler in the stunned silence, “Precious, you are naked.”
“Is you take off me clothes!” she shrieked, desperate to implicate another culprit in her crime. “Is you peel off every stitch of clothing off me body!”
She was cowering in a corner, her hands trembling uncontrollably, her eyes owlishly gaping.
“Lawd!” she screeched hysterically, indignantly, “you drop de tin can ’pon me head again!”
Chapter 22
Precious hurried back to Jamaica that very day. She departed in-a fit of hysterics, trailing behind her an unremitting flow of babbled explanations and justifications which Mannish assured her were unnecessary, for he thought it quite splendid that she had killed the stinking dog and if she would only not be hasty he was sure he could concoct some explanation of the dog’s demise to satisfy the mistress. But Precious panicked, convinced that once the mistress discovered her dog was dead she would run right out and book a freelance gunman to kill her Jamaican maid. She begged the chauffeur to say how long he thought it would take the mistress to hire a murderer through a magazine advertisement as she had seen on a television show. Mannish denied that the mistress would ever do such a thing, but in the face of persistent grilling and hysterical pleading, he grudgingly estimated that it would take at least two weeks. The mistress might be rich, but she drove a hard bargain and would need at-least a fortnight to haggle down the fee of any gunmen who responded to her advertisements.
“You take dis for a joke, Mannish Chaudhuri!” Precious shrieked. “It is not a joke! It was an accident!”
“Precious, it was a godsend. I beg you not to leave!”
But Precious would not stay. She would not be reasoned with. And she would not be mollified by schemes to dupe the mistress about what had really happened, by farfetched explanations Mannish was cooking up to explain the death of the dog. He was never specific with her when she demanded to know what earthly explanation of the dog’s death he was so sure would satisfy the mistress, but he kept insisting, “Precious, it will be all right. Leave the mistress to me.”
“I don’t want my bullet-riddled carcass displayed on de 6-o’clock news and used to sell toilet paper,” she ranted.
“Your carcass will not be displayed, Precious. This hatred of publicity is affecting your rationality.”
She crammed all her earthly belongings into the two battered suitcases she had brought with her from Jamaica and took a quick bath so she would at least return to her homeland smelling fresh and clean. Then she phoned Shirley to explain what had happened.
Shirley also implored her not to bolt to Jamaica, saying that she could come back to her house in Miami and stay there with no fear whatsoever of local gunman.
“Mummy,” she pleaded, “profit from your experience. Dis could be de start of a whole new career for you!”
How could a decent woman profit from fending off the unwanted attentions of an animal? What kind of career was she talking about? Precious demanded.
Shirley babbled desperately: It was about time someone came forward and boldly told the truth about horny Rover and Fido. How many millions of American women were at this moment silently suffering the heartbreak of domestic dog rape? Precious could become a nationally recognized lecturer on DRS, dog rape syndrome. She might sell her story to a tabloid. Who could say where such publicity could lead? Appearances on talk shows? A made-for-television movie?
Precious interrupted wearily.
“Kiss de children for me. I make up my mind. I will write you. I’m leaving before Mistress Lucy come back and find her dog dead.”
Mannish waved frenziedly at her when he heard her say this and piped from across the room, “The dog will not be dead here when the mistress returns! I want him as a souvenir.”
Precious hung up and angrily confronted the chauffeur. “I-did not kill dat dog so dat you can turn him into a souvenir! How much more biz
arre and mad can de world turn all of a sudden?”
“I’m sorry, Precious. If you want to take the dog, of course, you are entitled to him.”
“I don’t want de dog! De dog is dead! Nobody in dis country understands me! Least of all you!”
“Then if you don’t want him, why cannot I have him?”
“For what? To eat?”
“I will give him to my cousin to freeze-dry.”
Precious shrugged an ignominious surrender, for it was plainly no use. She couldn’t cope. Nothing made any sense anymore. In her mind, the world had torn loose from its mooring and wobbled in inky space beyond prophecy. There was no path, no light, no edging darkness to guide the foot of the uncertain pilgrim. She muttered that he could do what he wanted, so long as he took her to the airport, and with this pronouncement she collapsed into a chair.
He helped her lug the suitcases into the trunk of the Rolls Royce, and just before they left, he wrapped the late would-be rapist in a carpet and stuffed him in the trunk.
“You pack dat animal next to me luggage?” Precious carped.
“He is securely wrapped. He is not touching your luggage.”
Nevertheless, as they departed for the airport she still grumbled that there would be trouble if she found dog corpse rubbing up against her two grips.
On their way to the airport they stopped at the freeze-drying establishment of the cousin, a laughing relative much like an uncle from Precious’s youth who took the whole world as a big joke. The cousin cackled with laughter when they entered, and gave off much the same cackle when Mannish unwrapped the dog from the carpet and asked that he be mummified in the freeze-drying chamber.
“How did the dog die?” wondered the cousin, filling out an official-looking form. With Precious grimly present, Mannish delicately said that it was a long story, and this cryptic utterance caused another stringy cackle to wriggle out of the cousin’s mouth.
Dog War Page 15