News of the Spirit

by Lee Smith

  The first lesson was Making Eye Contact. “You can’t teach your dog anything unless he will make eye contact with you!” the teacher shrilled. To make eye contact, the owners were to hold a dog biscuit up between their eyes and say, “Look! Look!” Drew did this. Paula collapsed in hysterics.

  “Come on now, shape up,” Drew muttered, with the biscuit between his eyes. It was not clear who he was talking to. But the trick worked. Muddy Waters loved making eye contact. He was great at eye contact. Paula tried it next, and it worked again. To their right, the thin couple’s hound would not even glance at his owners but slunk abjectly around on the floor. It was certain he would come to no good end. Muddy Waters made eye contact better than any other dog in the class, and was brought forward as an example to the rest.

  “I’m so proud,” Drew whispered to Paula as they watched Muddy Waters on the platform with the instructor. “I know this is ridiculous.”

  But she thought it was sweet. She thought Drew was sweet. She had brought Muddy Waters home from her friend’s house not only because he was so cute but also because Drew kept talking about children. Drew wants children. He’s almost pathetically interested in all his little nieces and nephews. Paula recognizes this as a good trait in a man, but it scares her. There’s a way in which she cannot stand to think about having a child or doing anything else irrevocable, such as grow up. If you have a child, you have to grow up.

  Muddy Waters is enough. Training him took up all their extra time and energy for several months. But it was rewarding—Muddy Waters was a model student. The only thing they really had trouble with was his chewing. If they didn’t watch him every minute while he was inside, he’d chew something up. Anything—electrical cords, chair legs, dish towels. He was most fond of personal items such as slippers, jockey shorts, and socks. He even chewed up the leather briefcase that Paula gave Drew for his birthday. Reprimanded for this (“No!” in a deep stern voice, “No! No! No!”), Muddy Waters appeared sorrowful at first but then seemed to grin back over his shoulder as he walked away. He was not sincerely repentant. He kept right on eating their things. He also chewed their hands and feet—as if, Paula told Drew, in this way he could get closer and closer to them, as if he could somehow be them. He wouldn’t quit. He just loved them too much, it seemed.

  But then Drew hit upon a method of discipline that appeared to be at least halfway effective, or maybe Muddy Waters was growing out of the chewing stage by then anyway. Drew would grab him by the muzzle and squeeze, shaking his head back and forth. “We don’t love with our teeth!” he’d say sternly, maintaining significant eye contact all the while. “No! We don’t love with our teeth!” Muddy Waters hated to have his head shaken back and forth. He’d sidle away downcast, not grinning. It always worked for a while.

  NOW DREW FINALLY GETS MUDDY WATERS STAKED OUT in the yard, but the other dog, who is free, won’t leave him alone. Paula and Lulu, drinking vodka, watch all this through the kitchen window. They are not surprised when Drew, red-faced and sweaty, appears at the door and says, “Whose dog is that?” to Lulu.

  “Pete’s,” Lulu says. “Her name is Raquel Welch.”

  “Well, let’s find Pete, then, and tell him to do something about Raquel.” Drew is trying to control himself, Paula can see, but there’s a note in his voice he can’t help. Behind him, the dogs are humping in the yard.

  Lulu takes a swallow of her drink and smiles at him. “Sure,” she says. “Pete!” she yells, and then disappears. A minute or so later, there’s Pete out in the yard, dragging Raquel away by the collar to a pen where two other dogs are barking.

  “Why don’t you have a beer?” Paula asks Drew.

  “I guess I’d better,” he says. He decides to move the stake-out chain into the shade so Muddy Waters won’t get too hot. While he’s outside, Pete comes back into the kitchen.

  “Thanks,” Paula tells him. Pete has that same look around the eyes that Johnny does, she notices. She wonders what his story is. Drew comes back in and grabs his beer. “Are those hunting dogs?” he asks Pete.

  Pete nods. “Yep,” he says. “That little Raquel, she’s the best I ever had.” Then he tells a long hunting story starring Raquel. Drew listens carefully, nodding. Paula knows he won’t say he’s opposed to hunting, which he is. Drew is sensible as well as sensitive, a good combination. Johnny comes into the tiny kitchen, still with his arm around María.

  “Mom’s coming,” he tells Paula. “She just called to get more directions.”

  “With that guy?” Paula asks. “The new one?”

  “Yeah.” Johnny grins at Paula and the years fall away and Here’s Johnny! all over again, Here’s Johnny! just like Ed McMahon used to say, Johnny big as life and twice as handsome as ever, Johnny who stole money and cars and went on credit card sprees across the country, Johnny who wore them all out finally, his whole family…Here’s Johnny! having a party as if he never did any of it, or as if it didn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t. Water under the bridge, that’s what Corinne would say. Spilled milk. Paula’s heart rises up in her chest like a bird.

  Johnny smiles at her. “So how’ve you been?” he asks.

  “Pretty good,” Paula says. “The same. You know.”

  “Nice guy,” Johnny says, meaning Drew, meaning it. “Are you living with him, or what?”

  “Yes,” Paula says, and they both laugh. “Or what, I mean. It’s mostly or what. He wants to…oh, I don’t know. You know.”

  “Yeah,” Johnny says.

  María looks back and forth between them, smiling, trying to follow the conversation.

  “And you?” Paula says. “You look, I don’t know, different. Happy,” she adds.

  “Things are good,” Johnny says. “They’re real good. Hey, watch out now,” he says, letting go of María, grabbing three saucers from the stack where Lulu has put them beside the untouched cake. “Watch out, now!” Johnny sends the saucers into the air one by one, juggling them perfectly. María claps her hands.

  “You can still do that,” Paula says.

  “I can still do it.” Johnny catches them deftly and puts them back on the counter. “Hey, what’s going on? I bet Mom’s here.” Outside, all the dogs are barking, including Muddy Waters. Johnny pulls María out of the kitchen with him. Maybe they’re joined at the hip, Paula thinks.

  “How old is María?” Drew asks Pete, after they’ve gone.

  “Sixteen, seventeen maybe. Maybe even eighteen, we can always hope.” Pete smiles. “They grow up real fast down there in Mexico.”

  “How did he meet her?” Paula says.

  “It ain’t the prettiest story in the world,” Pete says, and pauses. Drew and Paula look at him.

  “It’s okay,” Paula says.

  Pete leans back against the counter and pops another beer. “Well, me and Johnny was together, actually, the day it happened, so I was right there. I seen it all. I had got a call to go out to this farmer’s place outside of Benson to put in some electrical wiring, and it sounded like right much of a project, so I got Johnny to ride out there with me. Him and Bo was between things at the time. So Johnny, he went out there with me, and come to find out this was one of them big-time tobacco operations that hires a lot of migrants. You know how that works?”

  Paula shook her head no.

  “Well, a farmer like that will hire him a certain number of contractors, they call them, and each contractor will be responsible for hiring a certain number of workers—twenty, say, or even thirty or forty in the camps. Each one of them contractors will have him a camp to run, see, that the farmer gives him. So the contractor is the one that’s in charge of getting so many head of workers to the field ever day, see, and running the camp. The farmer pays the contractor, and the contractor pays the workers. Pays them what he feels like, anyway,” Pete adds darkly.

  “You mean sometimes they don’t pay them what they’re supposed to,” Paula says.

  “That’s exactly what I mean, little sister. And these damn Mexicans, they’re s
o ignorant, they don’t know no better. Or these Negroes that they pick up in the homeless shelters in Miami and bring up there, hell, I’ve seen them get paid in liquor, in crack, every kind of damn thing. You name it. It’s awful what goes on in the world.” Pete shakes his head.

  “You mean that’s the kind of place you went to?” Paula can’t believe it. María looks so sweet and so, well, clean now.

  “It wasn’t the worst I’ve been to, but it wasn’t the best, neither. Not by a long shot. It was Mexicans, okay, which is better than Negroes, but it was some sorry setup, let me tell you. They didn’t have no bathrooms, no running water, nothing. Nothing but a cookhouse and a row of jerry-built rooms sitting out in the sun in the middle of a field, and it about a hundred degrees in the shade. We was out there to replace this generator that run the whole place. It looked like it had been broke for a while, too, so I don’t know what in the hell they had been doing for light or cooking. Anyway, it was the middle of the afternoon, and it was real deserted, everybody out in the fields, or so we think at the time. So we think.” Pete raises his eyebrows. “The generator is in this hot-as-hell shed by the cookhouse. So we’re in there working, and all of a sudden we hear this scream, it made the hair on your arms stand right up. Then there’s all this yelling in Mexican, then there’s more screams, then there’s more yelling. By then Johnny was on his way out there. I tried to stop him. ‘Johnny,’ I said, ‘it ain’t none of our business, and besides, it’s Mexican.’ Johnny just kept on going.”

  “He always was kind of a cowboy,” Paula says.

  “No kidding,” Pete says. “So I follow him out there, what else can I do? and it’s the biggest goddamn mess you ever saw. There’s these two guys down in the dirt hollering and going at it, and finally one of them gets on top of the other and bangs his head on the ground for a while. Guy had the hardest damn head in the world. So this goes on. And María, she’s standing over there against this ripped-up screen door crying, all wrapped up in a sheet or something. Her nose is bleeding all down the sheet. Finally this guy on the ground starts hollering something over and over in Mexican, I forget what it was, and the guy on top lets him go. The guy on top is a big fat Mexican, and the one he’s on is real little, it’s a wonder he’s still alive but he’s a tough little fucker. He gets right up and finishes buttoning his pants and shakes his fist in the air. Then he starts limping off, yelling all the time. The big one stands there breathing heavy and watches him go. ‘Well, thank God,’ I says to myself, ‘that’s over.’ This shows you how much I know about Mexicans. Because it ain’t over by a long shot. Hell, no. The minute the little Mexican gets on down the road a ways, the big one turns around and starts hollering at the girl. Now this confused me, you know. Up to that point, I figured the big one was protecting her. Shit, no. He hauls off and slams her in the stomach, her hollering mi ayuda and shit all the time. So she slumps over and kind of falls back through the screen door, and he looks like he’s going to hit her again.” Pete stops to light a cigarette.

  Drew is staring at him. “So what happened then?”

  “Johnny was there, of course. Johnny got over there in about a second and cold-cocked him. Big Mexican goes out like a fucking light, big cut on the side of his head. ‘Shit,’ I says to Johnny, ‘you’ve killed him.’ ‘I hope to God I have,’ Johnny says. Then he’s picking the girl up, real gentle-like. ‘Johnny,’ I tell him, ‘you’d better leave that alone.’ ‘Damn if I will,’ he says. So Johnny steps right through the busted screen door and carries her into the room, her crying all the time, and me following. The big Mexican, he don’t say nothing. He just lays on the ground. We get in the room, and it’s hot as an oven in there, no windows, no nothing. Nothing but a mattress on the floor and cardboard boxes and junk and clothes strewed all around and a mirror on the wall and a washbowl on a little table. Johnny looks around as good as he can, still carrying her. Then he says to me, ‘Get her clothes.’ I’m still standing in the doorway. ‘Huh?’ I say. I can’t believe it. ‘Get her clothes,’ Johnny says. So I grab a thing or two, some jeans maybe, but it makes me real nervous to be fooling around in there. You don’t want to get mixed up in nothing Mexican. I said as much to Johnny, but he was already out the door by then, still carrying her. Her hair was hanging down over his arm, and he was sort of patting her and saying little things to her like you would say to a puppy or something. ‘Now Johnny,’ I says, ‘I have still got to fix this generator.’ ‘Fuck the generator,’ he says, and puts her in the truck. Well, I walked over and took a real close look at the Mexican laying there and I come right on around to Johnny’s way of thinking that maybe we ought to get on back to the house after all. So we did.”

  “When did this happen?” Drew asked.

  “End of May,” Pete says.

  Drew shakes his head. It’s early September now. “No legal problems?” he asks.

  “None,” Pete says. “It turns out that the contractor comes back with the crew at the end of the day, hauls the big guy off to the hospital, where they have to operate on his head, and during the course of all this, they come to find out he’s wanted in Florida, in the worst kind of way. So he gets his ass extradited, and Johnny gets María. Bingo.”

  “Bingo,” Drew says. Drew and Pete look at each other, and Pete smiles. “I told Johnny, I said, ‘The last thing you need, my man, is this little girl out here. This ain’t no fucking Montessori school,’ I told him, but hey, what can you do? So we got us a day-care situation, after all.”

  Paula doesn’t get it. “Wait a minute,” she says. “Who was the big guy? The one Johnny hit?”

  “Her brother,” Pete says. “He brought her along to do tricks. That happens, with the harvest. There’s a lot of that.”

  “Jesus.” The vodka is getting to Paula’s brain. But she can recognize her mother’s voice now in the other room, that laugh just like a girl’s.

  And Corinne still looks like a girl, too, or at least she’s trying real hard to—but it’s a girl of another era, with flame-red lipstick and nails, her blond hair pulled up in back and held by a red bow. She wears white Bermuda shorts and a frilly red blouse with white polka dots on it. Red flats.

  “Hi, sweetie,” Corinne says, coming in the kitchen to wrap Paula in a cloud of perfume. Paula breathes in deeply, hugging her mother tight, surprised by how glad she is to see her.

  Corinne holds Paula out at arm’s length and scrutinizes her professionally. “Honey, you look like a million bucks!” she says. “Now where is he?”

  “Right here.” Paula introduces Corinne to Drew, Drew to Corinne. Corinne herself does not look like a million bucks, close up; she’s got deep lines around her eyes, and a scrawny wrinkled chicken neck. Paula wishes Corinne wouldn’t wear so much makeup, but then she’s wished this all her life. She remembers how her mother used to pinch her cheeks, hard, in the morning as she went out the door to school. “Let’s get some color in those cheeks!” Corinne would say. It really hurt. But Paula never doubted, not once, that her mother loved her. Now Corinne is talking to Drew, very animated. Paula pours some more vodka into her cup and gets a piece of melting ice from the bag in the sink. Across her mother’s frosted, frizzy hair, Drew makes eye contact with Paula and shakes his head slightly: No. Paula puts another ice cube into her drink and smiles at him. “Hi,” she says to the large florid man who has come to stand awkwardly in the door.

  “Paula, this is my friend Norell Hubbard,” her mother says. “Everybody, this is Norell.” Norell has a wide country smile; Paula likes him immediately. She has liked all her mother’s boyfriends, even Mike Papadopoulos, the inappropriate young one with the gold chain. Norell looks about right, to Paula. He wears a short-sleeved blue shirt and a tie with leaping fish on it.

  Corinne drifts over to whisper in Paula’s ear, “He can do anything with his hands. Anything! Just wait till you see the patio!” Paula squeezes Corinne’s hand, and they are just girls together after all, talking about boyfriends. Johnny and María come in the kitchen
then, where Lulu is handing out cake. Drew looks at Paula in a funny way but she can’t be sure, the vodka is hitting her brain. Whammo! María is giggling, she’s very cute. Then Paula and Drew are in the other room, where the music is very loud, they are talking to Lulu. Bo is there, too, but he’s not talking. Paula isn’t sure he can, come to think of it. Paula starts giggling.

  “You know she’s pregnant,” Lulu says.

  “Who?” Paula says.

  “María,” Lulu says. Drew goes grim, like a lawyer in a soap opera. They all talk some more, and then Drew leads Paula outside to check on Muddy Waters, who turns out to be asleep in the shade. Drew pulls Paula to him and hugs her tight. “Don’t drink any more,” he says. “You don’t have to. It’s all right.” Drew is good, good. He understands everything. Paula can feel the beat of his heart through his Izod shirt. “Okay,” she promises.

  But then Drew spoils everything by saying, “Of course she shouldn’t be allowed to have that child. Social services ought to step in, or something. Abortion ought to be mandatory in a case like this one. It might have anything in the world wrong with it, diseases, anything. It’s probably not even your brother’s child—who knows? Somebody ought to make her get rid of it.”

  Paula draws back to look at him. “I can’t believe you really think that,” she says.

  “Are you kidding? I’m a lawyer. And what chance does that baby have, anyway? I ask you. The child of a mental patient and a retarded Mexican teenager?”

  “How do you know she’s retarded? I don’t think she’s retarded. I think she just doesn’t know any English, that’s all.”

  “Come on, Paula. Grow up. Do you think these people could take care of a child?”