Year of the Dog

by Shelby Hearon

  Finally, after nearly a week of tabby’s unwelcome visits, I called Betty, our trusty advisor, to ask whether this was some trial that Beulah had to learn to deal with, a strange intruder in her territory, or whether I should call the Humane Society. Betty replied that if a blind person had an unwanted animal on her property that worried her dog and interfered with the dog’s attention, they would send someone to take it off the property for her. But in this case, I should do it myself, for the cat’s sake as well as Beulah’s. “This is bad weather for any animal to be homeless.”

  Taking action, I picked up a HavaHeart trap early the next morning from the Humane office, “The Place Where Friends Meet” as their sign said. Back home, I set about to cut up a whole Bell and Evans chicken and put it to soak in buttermilk, planning to cook it slow, on low, till it nearly fell of the bone. Figuring I’d have a lot of tidbits—the tail fat, the wings, the neck—to use as tempting scraps for the stray. And, for once, I didn’t feel that wrench of regret that Beulah couldn’t eat people food, since this meant there would be no danger of her getting herself caught in the kitty-trap before I got a chance to stop her.

  Also, of course, I hoped that a fine baked chicken might persuade James to take a break from the project that had kept him busy all week, and come over for supper and to warm my bed. But he said he couldn’t make it today; he’d take a blizzard-check, ha ha. “Janey, I’m picking up sandwiches from Irv’s and sleeping in my clothes. I miss you, but I’d freeze it off anyway in this weather.” And that felt like a major loss. I tried not to let my mind revert back to Curtis, which mostly I avoided, because that happened to be a long time and distance ago. But my ex could never get interested in sex unless I had on something he could pull up—a skirt, a nightie—by way of reassuring himself that what he had his hands on was definitely a girl, and he made clear he’d rather play pool than get near the idea of having sex with his wife wearing any kind of pants he had to pull down. So in this North Pole weather, I’d felt a rush of gratitude to be making love on a regular basis with somebody who didn’t mind excavating down through three layers of various garments with legs to find the bare me.

  Late in the day, having everything in place, I took Beulah’s face in my hands and explained that we were getting rid of yellow cat, and, smoothing her ruffled coat, tried to believe it myself. Leaving her inside, off the leash, I headed down the stairs to the HavaHeart with a dripping strip of chicken neck. The thing worked in a tricky manner: the animal could take a step into the antechamber and nothing happened. It could take another, change its mind, back out, and nothing happened. Hey, safe place. But as soon as it poked a paw to snare a tad of food in the back, rigged area, the wire door came crashing down—at least so the instructions promised.

  Naturally, our striped kitty, no dummy or she wouldn’t have picked my back yard, when she finally moseyed into view, made a couple of forays through the open door, daintily picking her way along the wire floor, took a sniff of the chicken delight, and backed out. Once, twice. The third time, she walked around the trap to the far end and tried to paw through the wire, but she couldn’t quite reach the treat. From that moment on, she didn’t even look at the contraption, but stood mewing at the foot of the stairs in the cold until it turned dark, her ribs showing.

  Discouraged, I was ready to forget it, but then things took a different turn. I went out after breakfast, bundled to the gills, with chicken morsel number three, a bit of wing—planning to slip it in before yellow cat came by for her morning break, when she liked to lick off the grimy snow from between her toes and groom herself before taking a stroll up the driveway. Surely, I reasoned, she couldn’t resist the smell of food another time. But blocking my way on the steps sat the roughest of the hoody persons upstairs: Roland, the bearded goon who I was supposed to believe had cleaned up his act and presently attended classes.

  “Hi, there,” I said, tender wing shard in my hand, wondering if the idea was I’d have to squeeze my thighs past his raunchy bearded face to get to the yard, where the HavaHeart sat empty of animal.

  “You trying to catch that cat hangs around?”

  “I am.” I turned sideways and scooted past him. Though I wore so many clothes, I might not have noticed if he’d copped a feel.

  “You want me to wring its neck?” His bad teeth made a grin.

  “Actually, no. No, really I don’t.”

  “You won’t get her that way.” He gestured to my savory bait.

  “Yeah?” I said. “It’s Roland, right?”

  “That’s my name. You wondering where Larry is, Larry has got himself a visitor is the reason I am sitting on my can in the open-air Frigidaire, waiting to get into my own place.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You have a better way to trap it?”

  “The cat sees that chicken, she thinks, Why’s nobody else around? Why aren’t other kitties trying to get that? What’s with the wussie dog doesn’t even look at it? She figures she’ll forget it. What you want, you want to put a mouse in there. She sees a mouse, she thinks the mouse got caught in the trap, she thinks I’ll just sneak in there and eat the mouse.”

  “Where am I going to get a mouse, Roland?”

  “We breed them upstairs. You didn’t know? Me and Larry we breed mice that the landlord doesn’t give a bucket of nails we got.”

  “Really?” I tried to keep my ears warm and still hear. I rubbed my gloved hands together. “I don’t have any.”

  “That’s because you got the dog, though I guess she’s not a real one. Larry says you’re not blind, which I can see. I thought you must be, having that kind of dog leading you around.”

  I sat down on the step by Roland, the snow brushed away, and looked him right in the face. “Could you get me a mouse? Today? I have to return the air-cooled tin can tomorrow.”

  “Could be.” He eyed me. “Could be we already got one under the sink. I hate seeing that tail stick out there. I’m kind of more disgusted than Larry about catching them. I got to get out of this place, get my own address. Sitting outside turning to a block of ice so he can screw a repeat type of the ex-wife who screwed him royal, you figure that one.”

  At that moment, Larry came around the side of the house, beer bottles in hand. “Hope I’m not interrupting,” he said.

  “What’d you do? Take her down out front? Leaving me sit here?”

  “You two getting acquainted?”

  “Me and her are having a talk. We need a mouse.”

  Larry had on a new blue parka, his hair combed and parted, and looked even more menacing cleaned-up than he ordinarily did. “You going after that cat?”

  “Since yesterday.”

  “My girlfriend says, ‘That blind lady down there, she’s got pets.’”

  “Tell her thanks for noticing.”

  Roland wiggled his hand in the air, like he was holding something by the tail, “Dead mouse?”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll go check for you.”

  Soon the three of us were reaching through the trapdoor at the bait-end and removing the frozen greasy chicken parts and substituting a delectable lure. I couldn’t make myself touch it. I gave them credit: Larry carried it down the back stairs between two wads of toilet paper, but Roland took it by the middle in his bare fingers and set it gently in place. Stepping back, I wiped my hands on my ski pants, even though I hadn’t actually touched the body.

  “Now what?” Larry asked, staring at the trap.

  “We wait.” I didn’t say it with a lot of confidence. And though I spent the next hour alternately cuddling with Beulah and peering out the locust-view window, I didn’t think anything would get tabby back inside for another try. By the time it started to flurry, I decided she might blow it off and hole up somewhere. But it was while I stood out there, a wool cap pulled down over my hair against the whipping wind, that I saw her saunter down the driveway to the cage. Sniffing the mouse through the baited end of the tunnel, she walked around and right through the open door, down the length of the wire
, and, pausing to twitch her hindquarters in the way of a lion about to leap on a gazelle, pounced on the mouse. At which moment the HavaHeart door clanged shut.

  Keys in hand, I ran up the outside stairs. At the top, I pounded on the door until Roland answered in just his jeans, stale hot air rushing out the doorway around him. Raising my eyes from his hairy belly, I yelled the good news. He and Larry pulled on wraps and helped me load the trap in the truck of the car, careful to put newspapers down first, and I promised them each a beer when I got back from delivering my captive to The Place Where Friends Meet. “Mew,” she said, keeping a clawed paw firmly on the mouse.

  So that was how come James found me an hour later, outside in my red hoodie under a sweater and parka, drinking beer on the somewhat sheltered porch between the two beefy guys who looked like escaped killers, Beulah’s head in my lap, toasting our success.

  “Hey, looky,” Larry said. “It’s your rich boy, come right up to the curb to get you. Somebody should tell him you come pick up a girl you don’t sit there like a taxicab.”

  I could see James look and look again. I raised my bottle to him. “Hi,” I called, feeling more than a little defensive.

  “You come to get Janey?” Larry called out. Saying under his breath, “I had that kinda teacher.”

  “I got a couple now,” Roland agreed.

  James walked around the car and stood at the bottom of the steps. “You busy? You want to take a ride somewhere?”

  Larry made a grunting noise and dropped his voice. “You got breaking news that can’t wait till the girlfriend finishes her beer out here in our ice-box?”

  “No,” James told him, sounding angry. “Nothing special” And then, to me, “I just dropped by to say, in case you happened to be interested, that I think I found my real dad.”

  “James,” I said, “wait.” And tossing my bottle in an arc out onto the snow, glad Beulah had her warm sweater on, I led her carefully down the slippery steps into his car.

  29

  OVER EGG-SALAD sandwiches at Irv’s, I said, “I thought it was the stray cat keeping you away.”

  “Huh?” He sat on the same side of the booth with me, and kept running his hand down my back. “I should’ve said something. I had my mind on surprising you. That or probably I thought I just might blow it. It was your dad did it.”

  “My daddy?”

  “Yeah. The same. Talbot in hardware.” He smiled and slid his fingers through my hair.

  “What did he do?” I’d tried to put the whole Christmas visit out of my mind.

  “Saying that at your aunt’s, about how he’d meant to be an engineer but stuff came along. A lot of people would be bitter. Thinking they could’ve been an engineer but the breaks were against them. Going through their life feeling trapped. But then, he let it go. I forgot the words he said, but the idea was: he let it go. The hardware was there; he took it. And he never had regrets.

  “He’s worked there my whole life.”

  James finished his sandwich and wiped his mouth with his fingers. “Janey, listen. Don’t you see, it made me think about my dad, my real dad. I mean, did he know he’d lost me? Did my mom tell him she had to give me up? Did he want to keep me, but then let go of that idea, or did he not ever know I was out there? Did he think, this is the point, did he think, like your dad said, This is how things worked out, maybe not the way I would have asked for, but here’s where I am and what I’ve got. You know?”

  It touched me, hearing this about my daddy, with his awful clothes and bigoted attitude. I never had half the charity in his direction that James obviously did. But what did I know about when he was young? He seemed to me to have come with Mom; I couldn’t imagine him without her. I didn’t even have an idea of what he might’ve been like—some boy who got steered into auto mechanics instead of trig, into constructing birdhouses and toolboxes in shop instead of building projects for the Science Fair in Greenville? You didn’t have a glimmer of who those people who raised you used to be. Or could have been.

  “He opened up to you,” I said.

  “Here’s the hard part. I never told you about the woman who adopted me or the stuff I do know about my real people because I had too much anger to even talk about it. Okay?” He pushed away our plates, and got us into our outdoor gear again, Irv’s being hot as an oven, and smelling of bacon, still, at noon, and scorched coffee, and other good diner smells.

  It hurt, a little, that he’d known stuff he hadn’t shared, information that he pretended all this time didn’t exist. But at the same time I felt happy at the idea that finally I’d find out who he really was.

  “You wanna take a drive?” he said when we’d stepped out the door into the cold.

  “Sure. Beulah will be fine in the car.”

  “I just feel like driving. You know how you can talk when you’re looking at the road and watching for traffic, and, uh, can’t see the other person’s face?”

  “I do,” I told him. Trying to get my mind around the idea that James really had a history, like the rest of us, a past, and even had, or might have had, a family. I threw my arms around him by the car while Trusty Dog waited in the snow and he fished out his keys.

  Then instantly we were sailing south along a stretch of plowed, white roadway, white mountains covered with white forests on the one hand, on the other, across the lake, the high white peaks of the Adirondacks, and not a sound, not another car in sight. Here and there a white church steeple and a cluster of white houses with white pickups and white barns, and, far away, silver bridges spanning white blanketed rivers. I could have sat, content to ride, till sundown. Once I glimpsed a hawk, perhaps circling for a snow hare, high above us.

  James slowed the car as the wind blew snow off the roadside onto the windshield. Outside the window everything looked silent; inside, where it was warm, there were car sounds and our breathing.

  “You okay?” James asked.

  “This is beautiful.”

  “So, here goes.” He straightened his back. “The woman who raised me, you saw her picture, her name was Norma. She told me she’d thought if she got a kid, her husband would hang around. I was—that kid. He moved out the day she brought me home.”

  I waited, Beulah still against my leg.

  His eyes fixed on the windblown highway, he talked about her, the surrogate mother. She married right out of high school and had no skills. She tried clerking; she tried door-to-door selling. She got typing jobs and lost them. She learned dictation from a book but nobody dictated any more. “She’d say to me, ‘You’re not my kid, Jimmy, but I got you and I’m going to do my best by you.’ She dragged her brother over to help out. Razz. Uncle Razz, she told me to call him. He’d throw me a ball once in a while; he’d give me free advice. She told me to call her Norma. ‘You know,’ she’d say, ‘Norma, like Marilyn Monroe, that was her real name.’ She pretended she’d taken me in to help out her sister or some friend who’d got in a jam, if anybody asked. When I shot up five feet, six feet, she couldn’t stand anybody to think she was old enough to be my mom. ‘He’s not my boy,’ she’d tell anybody who’d listen. ‘Big boy like that, no way.’ She’d forget if I remembered her husband or not, having invented a dozen versions of when he left. ‘Jimmy,’ she’d say, ‘you could find him for us, I bet. I bet he’d like to hear you’re half grown and all, that you turned out pretty good.’”

  I pulled off my gloves and put my hand on his arm. “Oh, James, that must’ve been—hard.”

  “She spelled my name M-a-r-t-i-n. I thought that’s what it was.”

  I put his cold fingers against my cheek.

  “She got sick. Razz was the one that called me. ‘Norma’s in pretty bad shape, Jimmy, you better come. In case she takes a bad turn.’ A couple of months later she could hardly get out of bed and the doctor started her on palliative stuff. It had eaten up her insides.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  We pulled to one side of the road as did two cars behind us, going single file while
a snowplow moved through. When both lanes were clear, James started talking again. “So at the last, I went back. I took her a Coke and a big quart paper cup of ice—she got some relief from chewing the ice—and she said, ‘Sit down, Jimmy, I ought to tell you what there is to tell.’ She got herself propped up. ‘Get down that box on the shelf in my closet.’ I hated to go in there—.” He looked over at me and I nodded to let him know I was listening, then focused on the road, as a car trying to pass skidded and then righted itself. “I got down the box, it looked like a bunch of old letters and bills and junk, and mostly it was, papers she couldn’t even remember what they were. She asked me to show her every one, and finally I got to this envelope that said JIMMY’S FOLKS. In her handwriting. Inside there was my original birth certificate, not the fixed-up one they do for adoptions.”

  “You must’ve freaked out.”

  “You can’t guess if you haven’t been there.” He pulled the car into the empty parking lot of a rest area. “Okay if we get out a minute? Beulah’s doing all right, isn’t she? I’ll leave the engine on.”

  “She’s fine. I’m fine.”

  Outside, the two of us stood at the edge of the plowed lot, facing a stand of white-branched hardwoods, and in the distance, fir high on the slopes. He spoke in a low voice, trying to sound matter-of-fact. He had been born to a divorced woman named Lucille Freeman, no father listed. He’d asked Norma why wasn’t his name Freeman, but she said the woman wanted him to have the real daddy’s name: M-a-a-r-t-e-n. “Just like I saw it in The Netherlands. But Norma had changed it to the usual spelling so I wouldn’t stand out in school, having a name teachers might ask about. Like she said, half the phone book that isn’t Smith or Jones is Martin.” He tugged off his knit cap, wiped his forehead, then pulled the cap down to his eyebrows.