Year of the Dog

by Shelby Hearon

  My brain remembered the thrill of that time, when everything about Curtis had stopped my heart. He’d walk down the street moving fast and smooth, like a halfback about to run for a tackle, eating a cone or a burger with one hand, waving to the town with the other. When he started hanging out with me, he talked a lot about my ambition. He wanted to catch some of it, he said, because he wanted to make something out of himself. So when it became clear I liked my job at the pharmacy and wanted to make that my work, he’d stop by, talking to me about what did I think about the emergency medical service, didn’t I think they did more than the doctors?—being right there on the spot when somebody had a heart attack or got themselves in a car accident? He got excited about the EMS, figuring if he worked for them we’d be in the same field: saving lives.

  By the time we got our diplomas, he’d begun riding with the ambulance crew, studying up on first-aid measures. And I guess I started to split in two at that time: trying to get my pharmacy degree and trying to hang onto Curtis. It didn’t take much persuasion to talk me into a wedding while I was still in school at USC. I guess at that time I’d have followed him nude down the street with a rose in my teeth if he’d asked.

  But things worked out differently between me and Curtis from what I’d expected. He gave up on making a living or even getting a lot of satisfaction from riding ambulances. He thought about being a nurse, but his buddies made a lot of jokes about Nursie Curtis, and he’d given up on that. His dad suggested he try life insurance: Who helped the injured guy the most? Who helped him in his back pocket? So he did that, became a claims adjuster. That might’ve been fine, except that people in town kept telling him his wife had sure been a help, how she’d got their husband off his deathbed. People kept asking him, Are you Pharmacist Daniels’ husband? And then one day somebody brand new to town hollered out the car window, “Afternoon, Mr. Daniels.” And Curtis came home, his face blazing, and shouted at me. “You think you’re the tail, don’t you, Janey? Well, you’re not the tail and you’re not gonna be wagging me.”

  When he took the case for Mr. Dawson, promising to get him a truck-load of money for an injury to his back—some dumb nut hitting his car broadside in a pile-up—he made a trip by the pharmacy to tell me. “I’m gonna get him a bundle. Man just wants to get his car overhauled; I’m gonna get him enough to buy the dealership.”

  “Is that Millie’s daddy?” I’d asked. It came out of my mouth, the wrong question, old people in wheelchairs and a couple of regulars waiting, and me, all of a sudden, acting like I was back at Peachland High.

  “If he is, what about it? You don’t remember that I haven’t been with her since the day I nearly broke my ass trying to hook up with you? You don’t remember that? I bet she remembers that. You want me to tell him I can’t make the deal, it wouldn’t be ethical to get him his wad of compensation because I once had the opportunity to get into his daughter’s pants? Is that it?”

  We had an audience by that time, naturally, so I said, “That’s great, Curtis,” to his suit-coated back barging out the door.

  I’d been grieving that day over some bad news about the mother of First Baptist’s pastor, news I hadn’t any business sharing but which made me heavy inside. But even if I’d wanted to violate pharmacy confidentiality, no way I could’ve got Curtis to listen to this worry on my mind. And that hurt me a lot, that he didn’t have an interest in people outside himself. No wonder I’d asked about Millie; I must’ve really been asking if he was wishing himself back single again.

  We’d had a sort of fight the week before. I’d mentioned to him here we were turning twenty-five, had got ourselves a nice house with a yard, and maybe it was time we thought about a family. I knew that Mr. Sturgis would let me have baby-leave or at least cut down my hours if I asked. He’d promised that the day I started work full-time, with my degree finished and a ring on my finger.

  But Curtis didn’t have an interest in dependents, four-legged or two. “Look at my dad,” he’d said, waving a bottle of Bud. “He used to be the one you didn’t want to mess with, the one that the girls lined up for, so I hear. Then what happened? He became my dad. What’s his name? My dad. What’s he got on his mind? Making sure his boy doesn’t mess up, making sure his boy keeps his pants zipped and does not throw away his chances. That’s it, that’s his life. I’m not going down that road, Janey. Not for sure now. Did you think I was? I don’t think we had that conversation. You’re the one sells the stuff that keeps folks from making that mistake. Isn’t that right? Aren’t you the one?”

  “I just thought, we’ve been married five years.”

  “Woman has one baby, man has two dependents.”

  It was in plain sight. He won the claim for Mr. Dawson: a ruptured vertebra resulting from a three-car pile up, with serious skidding in a driving rain. He had cause and fault down cold, though it might take a while, he said, the way claims did, and he’d need to work close with his client.

  By the time Mom called me to say her good friend Madge at the bank had seen Curtis having dinner with the Dawsons at the Southern Fried Cafe, his arm around their daughter Millie who’d driven over from her bank job in Columbia for the occasion, and who still looked as pretty as she had at seventeen, the whole town had passed the news along.

  What a feast they’d be having now—finding out Millie had been already pregnant by the time she unfolded that dinner napkin.

  6

  Dear Mom,

  I thought I’d write you about what I know is of major interest to you and what I hope will get your mind off thinking about the gossip at home. Yesterday, I drove down to Charlotte, which you know is called CharLOTTE up here, to see the little town where Bert Greenwood sets his stories. It looks, as you can see from the pictures enclosed, just like a typical small friendly New England town with the tall church spire and white clapboard city hall that mystery writers love.

  Beulah and I visited the public library and, across the street, the cozy Flying Pig bookstore, and stopped on our way out of town at the old red brick store where the Judge in the books (and maybe Mr. Greenwood in real life!) has his morning coffee. I had a scone, which I am learning to enjoy since it is like a sweet biscuit dough with dried fruit, and took a good look at the other customers.

  Hope you and Daddy are still having nice weather down there.

  Please tell Mr. Sturgis hello for me.

  Love,

  Janey

  * * *

  I’d gone down to Charlotte for two reasons, neither of which I had a mind to share with my family. One was to give Beulah a chance to learn a new location, walk along new sidewalks (though it turned out there weren’t any, the grass coming right to the edge of the streets), and to see if I could spot a poster of Bert Greenwood maybe from a reading at the library or a signing at the bookstore. But the librarian said he never gave readings; and the lady at the Flying Pig bookstore said she always sent the books to Burlington for him to sign.

  So I contented myself with snooping around the Senior Center, the focus of Charlotte’s Web, where old Mrs. Riley falls dead in her T’ai Chi class as if from natural causes. The center looked just the way it was described in the book, boxy and busy, with people playing Mah Jong or taking a break for tea. I even saw the large stone urn on the porch filled to the brim with cigarette butts in which the Judge discovers a cigar stub. The clue which ties the crime to her long-lost brother and heir to her wealth, a scoundrel who sicced a dog on her when they were young, leaving her with lifetime scars. I didn’t find the deep backyard with the gazebo where Mrs. Riley’s pet pig is discovered loose, letting the Judge know someone has broken in her home. But Beulah had begun to sag with traversing so much grass and with not knowing what her person wanted from her in this new place.

  Next time, I thought I could let her try one of the winding dirt farm roads on the back way into town, and take some water for her to lap outside before I had my sweet at the old red brick store, which, this being Vermont, was of course called The Old R
ed Brick Store.

  7

  I HEADED DOWNTOWN in the after-supper dusk the following Saturday, enjoying the heat on the first day that the temperature had been over eighty since I arrived nearly a month ago. I had on my best white shorts with blue patch pockets on the back, and my red halter with a sailor collar, showing off a suntanned back and lots of leg in celebration of summer weather at last. I had good puppy on her short working leash, in her nifty orange Companion Dog vest, so she would know right off that this was the kind of outing where you had to attend to your name and directions, and different from the freeplay afternoons on the long umbilical leash at the Dog Park.

  We had been down to the brick streets lined with shops, closed to cars, before. We’d bought bread from the cute guy at the fresh-bread kiosk, navigated around other dogs large and small, and found the fountain across from the Unitarian Church, (from which Church Street got its name), where Beulah knew she could not splash, being a puppy-in-training and therefore not allowed to explore her environment when she was on her working leash. One late afternoon we’d stopped at a sidewalk cafe and I’d had a cup of coffee with milk and a toasted sesame bagel, while she sat attentive by my chair, not minding that at near-by tables huskies and shepherds got to share muffins with their back-packing persons. It was really hard for me, to eat with her just sitting there, but I understood: a trained dog should not be distracted from her duty to her person by the tempting smell of pastrami or fries, nor could her blind person handle a puppy cadging food from strangers.

  Beulah liked to have outings, which she was supposed to do a lot, and coming downtown was part of helping her become a mannerly companion. For instance most always there’d be some dog a block away barking, which she was not allowed to do, and although I knew how to put my hand on her throat to stop her while telling her to sit, she’d learned not to be distracted by the other dogs, or by the occasional one who would jump up on its person who then had to shout, “Quit that, no, no, bad dog,” words that we never used with our puppies who were raised only with praise.

  Most days when we went downtown there wasn’t much of a crowd. I’d started noticing a fair number of women with long braids down their backs or over one shoulder, sometimes brown or silver, plus a lot of men with beards, some of them old as time, wearing bandanas around their foreheads. And there would always be a cluster or two of French-speaking visitors come down from Canada. But hardly any blacks, and that felt weird to me, coming from the South: as if I’d landed in a gated state.

  This Saturday, however, turned out to be different. Even though I knew it was the Jazz Festival and even though I’d heard loudspeakers calling to us like sirens to come out, I hadn’t prepared myself. That is, I hadn’t prepared Beulah for about a thousand people at least, wandering around, crowding the outdoor tables, listening to the sounds of clarinets, saxes, keyboards coming from open cafe doors or over the mikes on high nailed-together bandstands. A way mixed crowd brought to town by the music—crowds of blacks (island blacks, African blacks, and downhome blacks), scattered Asians, clusters of tourists speaking in French and German and a language I couldn’t guess.

  I felt out of place and alien in my red, white and blue American flag outfit, showing four-foot of bare leg and half a yard of bare back, when all the visible females near my age wore ground-dragging skirts or doubled-over army pants riding on the pubic bone and undershirt-style tees in what I guess you’d call vegetarian colors: eggplant, squash, pumpkin, kale, mushroom.

  But I tried to enjoy being out and to keep my mind on Beulah, who stuck close beside my leg in the mob, and didn’t, the way another dog would, at any time sniff the sides of buildings to see who’d been there before, or try to mark the poles that held up the store awnings, or whine at being down there in proximity to a couple of hundred shins. Trying to make a space between bodies to steer her through, I felt something warm and wet nose around my butt, and wheeled to see a humongous white shaggy dog of immense presence and beauty—looking at my girl as if at a snack. Quickly, I did the defensive move from the Puppy Manual and placed my creamy lab between my calves, protecting her with my body, and said in a friendly way to the rail-thin woman in a long paisley skirt holding onto the outsized hound, “My, isn’t he big? Sheep dog?”

  “Pyrenees,” she corrected, but, spotting my dog, tugged her chummy monster away by his choke collar.

  Slowly, I maneuvered us along the strip of shops in the direction of Banana Republic, where I’d seen a red hoodie that I thought would cheer me up and be just right for windy walks along the lake, though I could see it might be too bright to wear downtown. I didn’t used to worry about clothes at home—if we were going out, back when we meant Curtis and me, I’d change from my white pharmacist’s coat into a flowered dress and maybe sandals with heels. And take a little time with my face, so I’d feel in a party mood and he’d take notice. Or if he was going to be late, just put on running shorts.

  But they’d changed the window displays since I’d last been here last; now every single window featured Father’s Day outfits—khakis and white shirts, white shorts and khaki tees. But surely fathers didn’t buy their clothes at Banana Republic? I tried to imagine mine, Talbot Daniels, out of his pressed shirt with no tie for the hardware store, buying an outfit for mowing the back yard or sitting in the sunroom, with his bedroom slippers on, watching golf, a game he’d never played. But then it came to me, slowly and with a kind of heavy weight attached to it, that some fathers were no older than I was, that some fathers were exactly the age of me. Curtis for instance. Curtis who would be one before the next time these windows got dressed up to honor daddies.

  In zero seconds, my eyes flooded and having no sleeve to wipe them on, I used the little cloth bag with cows on it I’d bought to carry my wallet and keys. Sopping wet quilted cows. “Oh, Beulah,” I sniffed, there in the herds of hundreds milling by who paid me no mind. And when she looked up at me, hearing her name, I had to say, “Good girl,” and tell her to sit, and then say it again, because she did.

  Then, just as I heaved a sigh and bent to wipe my nose on the back of the cows again, the person from the Dog Park appeared, looking just the same: familiar. A comforting sight, for what did I care what someone like him, with the straggly face hair and mushed-down hat, thought of my making a display of myself on Church Street in plain sight of legions of the friends of jazz.

  “Janey?” He peered at me.

  “James.” I held out my damp hand.

  “Hey,” he bent and spoke to good dog, who seemed to sense that she’d been in the vicinity of his kneecaps before, although she glanced around as if looking for his big three-colored dog from the park. He introduced me to another teacher about his age named Pete, the sort of pudgy sidekick with overbite, old remnants of acne, and an eager smile that I also remembered from school. So I liked him, too. And to three of their students with various piercings who claimed their names were Cubby, Wolf and Lobo.

  I shook all their hands, wiping mine dry, telling them I was from South Carolina, a foreign country to them.

  “I was going to call you,” James explained, apparently not bothered that his people were listening in as best they could among the din, “but I didn’t get your last name.”

  “Daniels,” I said, “anyway, I’m not in the book; I’ve just got my cell up here.” Then, because I felt warm toward him, for coming along at the right time and acting like he was glad to almost literally run into me, I told him the truth. “I looked you up in the phone book, but there were nine James Martins, four of them married.” I smiled.

  “Hey, hey,” one of the kids gave him an elbow.

  “It’s M-a-a-r-t-e-n.” He spelled it for me.

  “That’s Dutch or something.”

  “Yeah, they spell it like that over there.”

  Pete said, “We take students abroad, that’s what we do, James and I, the ones doing the summer abroad programs. He does The Netherlands and I do Germany. The Experiment in International Living sets it
up for us.” He looked proud. “Over there I spell my name P-i-e-t-e-r.”

  I looked at him, and then at James, with appreciation. World travelers. It made sense. That’s what happened to those boys who appeared in our classes for a few years, got top grades and high scores, and then vanished. They went somewhere.

  They asked me if I’d like to head up the street with them, but I said, “Puppy’s worn out,” and by then she must have been.

  James hung back after the others started off. “You were, uh, crying it looked like? When we came up?”

  I nodded, thumping my cow-bag against my bare thigh. “Yeah, a little, I was. I guess it was seeing all this stuff for Father’s Day.” I gestured. “In the windows?”

  He looked away and tugged his knit cap down over his eyebrows. (A knit cap in midsummer? It must be a local thing.) “Yeah, Father’s Day.”

  “Here,” I said, and wrote my cell number on the back of his hand with a felt pen, hoping he wouldn’t smudge it too much to read. Then, giving him a wave, I began to inch through the mob with Beulah by my side, letting him think I was some sort of noodley person who would be weepy over her daddy at twenty-five years of age.

  For a minute I considered getting a Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia cone, but when we pushed our way to their parlor, there must’ve been fifty-five people waiting in line for cones, half of them outside on the street, two of whom happened to be young, pink-cheeked and pregnant. I didn’t need that.

  Instead, I turned down a near-empty side street into a warm and gusty wind which I took gratefully in my lungs. And we listened for a minute, catching our breath, to the fading sounds of a wailing clarinet.