by Nathan Roden
Babe whistled twice, which was an unconscious decision. The two big dogs never broke stride in their retreat. The puppy stopped. He turned and ran a few steps after the big dogs and then stopped again. He stood, wagging his tail. Babe whistled again. The puppy crept a few paces toward him.
“You may as well come over here, pup. I have enough food to fix that empty belly many times over, and it doesn’t look like your buddies have waited for you,” Babe said.
The puppy continued to creep toward Babe, his hunger overriding his fear. Babe had heard plenty of stories about Labrador retriever owners. They bought the dogs because they were adorable puppies, good with kids, and about the friendliest of breeds. The down-side was the behavior that most people refused to tolerate for long. Lab puppies tend to tear shit up.
When the pup got within a few feet of him, Babe turned and walked slowly toward where the motor homes were parked. He stopped and told the puppy to “sit”. The puppy sat.
“Huh,” Babe said.
Babe arrived at the door of his uncle’s motor home. He looked back and saw that the puppy was still seated. The puppy panted easily and turned his head side to side as if he had placed his order at a sidewalk cafe and was now engaged in people watching. Babe turned around and knocked twice on the open door. He stuck his head inside.
“Hey, Dad?”
Robbie walked to the door.
“Are you all right, son? Are you ready to go?”
“I’m okay, dad. Say, listen, do you mind if I take a few more minutes?” Babe asked.
“You take all the time you want, Joshua. Zach and I can visit for days if we need to,” Robbie said.
“Great. Hey, is your motor home unlocked? I want to get some food out of there,” Babe asked.
“Yeah, it’s unlocked. But we have some things heated up right here,” Robbie said.
“I want to get some meat for my little buddy over there.”
Babe turned to point in the direction of the puppy.
Robbie leaned out the door, squinting.
“Where did he come from? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“He must have been dumped here. He’s just a puppy,” Babe said.
“Are you going to keep him?”
“I…I was just— I don’t—”
Babe heaved a sigh.
That’s thinking ahead, huh? You could have left a big ole plate of food here, and the three of them would have eaten like kings tonight. But now that you have the little guy trusting you, you’re going to….what? LEAVE HIM—to starve? To DIE?
Wow. I have become a dog owner. A decision made by…..the dog? Babe thought.
I have a Master’s degree in psychology that says that I am trained to assist my fellow man in matters of the mind. What would ‘fellow man’ say if he could see the gears grinding inside of my head right now? Is that ironic? I’m not sure. I can never remember the definition of irony.
“I guess I’ll have to take him home. I don’t know what else to do.” Babe said. “I’ll empty one of those big plastic containers for him to ride in. He’s absolutely filthy and I’m sure that he smells like the inside of a camel.
“Why don’t we have Zach load as much of that food as he can carry? We’ll never make a dent in all of that and he has those two steam shovels at home to feed.”
”Sure,” Robbie said.
Babe arrived at the door of his father’s motor home and met Zach walking from the opposite direction.
“Hey, Uncle Zach. You’re not looking for Dad are you?”
“No, no, no. I’m just coming back from, uh, well, are you familiar with the ten commandments of RVs?’
Babe laughed.
“Oh yeah, Dad taught me. Rule Number One: No Number Two in the RV.”
Zach joined Babe in the laugh and then the big man clapped a huge hand on Babe’s shoulder.
“God, I’m so sorry, Josh. That girl of yours was such a sweetheart. You remember at the reunion a few years ago when my two knuckleheads wouldn’t leave her alone until she agreed to pitch to them? They couldn’t stand hearing about ‘the girl pitcher’. Man, am I glad I got that on the camcorder. You remember? She struck them both out three times in front of God and EVERYBODY. They got redder and redder like they were about to EXPLODE. Then she chased them both down and kissed them until they couldn’t stop laughing. That was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Hell, I’ve played that tape so many times that I backed it up on a CD and I keep a half-dozen copies in my safe. Yes, sir. Those boys are getting so much attention from recruiters right now that if they even look like they’re getting the big head, I go get a CD and wave it at them.”
“The recruiters are for football, right?” Babe asked. “Dad showed me some of the newspapers. Little Phillip and Little Brandon—setting the world on fire. Sophomore and junior now, right?“
“That’s right. They both play offense and defense but they’re getting most of the attention for playing offensive line. The other teams quit even trying to put their best players up against them because they just end up on their butts. The quarterback of this team, who incidentally has not come close to being sacked for two full seasons, is about to smash every state record there is for a quarterback, and the recruiters are drooling. And my boys protect his blind side. Get this, Josh.”
Zach made an exaggerated show of looking left and right.
“That monstrosity I’m driving? Guess whose father owns that dealership?”
Babe laughed.
“You’re kidding, Uncle Zach.”
“Now, I bought it, fair and square and legal—cross my heart and all that. I’m just saying there was nothing competitive about the price. So are you and Robbie ready to leave?”
“Not quite yet. I was about to get some meat for my new little buddy.”
“Well would you look at that,” Zach said. “Just a pup. Somebody dumped him out here?”
“Looks that way,” Babe said.
“He was running away and for some reason I whistled at him. Now I’m stuck with him.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence, Josh; might be a good thing for you, right now.”
“Maybe. Say Uncle Zach, why don’t you take some of this food with you? It would be a shame for it to go to waste. Dad and I won’t be able to eat all of this.”
“Now that I can help you with.”
Babe filled a paper plate with chicken and ham. The puppy ate like, well, like a starved puppy. He stopped eating with a few pieces of meat left on the plate and waddled to the edge of the bushes. He stared in the direction that the two big dogs had run away as if to let them know that he was saving them a portion. He gave up within a few seconds.
Babe got down on one knee and tried to coax the puppy to come to him. The puppy took a couple of steps toward him and stopped.
“I guess I have to give you a name, don’t I, Joe?”
Babe had kept his emotions in check all day. He had known for years that Jill was dying. And though his heart was broken because she was finally gone, he felt the need to hold it together; for Jack—because Jack had lost twice.
But Babe had just given away the name of his unborn son—the son that he would not have. He choked back a sob now but would not allow himself another. He had to be strong.
But he also had lost. Twice.
Heaven Can Wait was the 1978 film starring Warren Beatty as Joe Pendleton, a backup quarterback with the Los Angeles Rams. Joe finds himself at an afterlife way station when he is plucked prematurely from the scene of an accident— his death appearing inevitable to the angel in charge. However, heaven’s records show that Joe would have escaped the accident and lived another fifty years. What followed was the quest to return Joe to another body, since his body had been cremated by the time the mistake was discovered.
Babe had watched the movie over a dozen times and had every scene and almost every word of dialog memorized.
The movie was also Jack’s favorite. It was the movie that Jack and Jill watched to
gether several times—the movie that provided a continual running joke between the three of them. It was the movie that provided Babe with the name that he reserved for his first born son.
The puppy looked at Babe and cocked his head to the side.
“Are you ready to go home, Joe Pendleton?”
The puppy sprang at Babe and knocked him from his one knee stance firmly onto his butt cheeks in a puddle of mud.
Babe sucked air and winced at the cold water, but amid the enormous tongue lapping at his face and the touch of the warm body that he needed more than he had known, he smiled.
The pup finished his licking and pressed the top of his head into Babe’s neck. He turned himself to sit in Babe’s lap like a toddler. They looked ahead, almost at eye level with the headstone.
“She would have loved you, Joe. And you would have loved her, too. Everybody did. I guess heaven couldn’t wait.”
Babe held the pup’s front paws in his hands. He used his right hand to make the puppy wave.
“Goodbye, honey. Save us a place.”
He looked down.
“Mister Pendleton, Sir, the two of us could use a bath.”
Six
Babe spoke with his neighbors about having his father’s RV parked in his driveway over the weekend. No one voiced a complaint. Of course, they all knew the situation and most had known the “friendly, pale, skinny girl in the big sun hat that didn’t look well”. They were good neighbors and were not about to buy themselves an express ticket to hell by complaining.
Much of the neighborhood spent an unusual amount of time outside over the weekend—keeping an eye on the motor home as if they had never seen one before. Robbie would be moving to a nearby campground by sunrise on Monday. Babe knew that the ladies that headed up their Homeowners Association would be on the prowl Monday morning, and they had a reputation for being ruthless—like a ‘nuns with rulers in both hands’ kind of ruthless.
It was rare for Robbie to stay overnight anywhere other than his motor home. The motor home was, in fact, the only home that he owned. Not that he was in financial need of any kind. On the contrary, after suffering for a few years with a pinched nerve in his lower back obtained in an accident in a patrol car, he had a bed installed in the motor home at a cost of over ten thousand dollars. It was more fully adjustable than any bed on the market, and as Babe loved to say, “That mattress is filled with the pubic hair of angels”. He laid on it one time for twenty seconds and jumped off, saying that he was in danger of losing the ability to sleep on a bed made for mere mortals.
“Well, that’s not a bad looking dog, now that he’s clean,” Robbie said, entering the sun room fresh from a shower and toweling his hair.
He knelt down and scratched the pup behind the ear.
And you’re pretty handsome yourself, little fella.”
Babe grimaced, his hair also wet after a shower.
“Oh, you must stop, Mr. Babelton. Your humor is devastating,” Babe said.
”I’m going to bring in some wood and start a fire. It’s getting chilly already.”
“Excellenté,” Robbie said. “Hey, how about in the morning we pick up a pet door? If we put one in that back door, Joe can let himself in and out to the yard. I don’t know how else you can make this work unless you have plans for a heated dog mansion.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Babe said. “I’ll be sure to alert the emergency room that we’ll be using power tools. I need to pick up a bed, a collar, and a leash, and get him on some real dog food before he starts to think he lives at a deli.”
The fireplace crackled, sending the aroma of burning oak into the darkening sun room. Robbie had brought in an enormous pillow from his motor home and laid it on the floor in front of the fireplace. Joe snored softly, lying on his back on the pillow with his paws in the air.
Babe brought a pitcher of water from the kitchen and split it among the three house plants he was trying to keep alive. He returned from another trip to the kitchen and handed Robbie a cup of cocoa.
“This room is new. You must be doing really well at that ‘mystery’ business of yours,” Robbie said.
“This was Jack’s house warming gift,” Babe said.
“A week after we moved in he called and said he was coming over. He pulled up thirty minutes later followed by a Hummer and three gigantic pickup trucks. He introduced us to these four guys and they spent the next two hours walking around, talking, and pointing. A month later this room was finished, along with the gardening shed and the little greenhouse out back.”
“I never told you, Dad, but I really can’t afford this place. Jamaica Plain was always Jill’s favorite, and we were out here all the time. She bought bicycles one Christmas and the first time we left the condo I knew where we were going. She always had plants and flowers in our first apartment, and then the condo, but I used to find her looking around outside for more space. It always made me sad. So what was I going to wait for? She was getting sicker all the time.”
“Well, for what it’s worth,” Robbie said. “I think you did the right thing.”
He paused.
“Are you going to stay here?”
Babe exhaled slowly.
“I really want to. This is Jill’s home. It feels like…it feels like she’s still here—in this room, in the yard, and the garden. Does that sound stupid?”
“Of course not.”
“The HOA dues are going up, and last year my property taxes went up ten percent probably because of this room. The agent I used to buy the place has called a few times because she has buyers asking about it. She’s always telling me ‘Mr. Babelton, we can make you a nice profit on your property.’ But this is not ‘my property’. This is Jill’s home. And this is Jill’s room that opens into Jill’s garden. I don’t want to leave.”
“Don’t leave, Joshua. If you need any help you let me know, immediately. I mean that, son.”
“You do okay, then, right? With money, I mean,” Babe asked.
“Yeah. Full disability just turned over into full retirement, and I don’t have a lot of overhead. I was going to stay in the house but the winters were killing me. Some days I couldn’t get out of bed at all. I’ve gotten used to this gypsy living, now. I don’t think I could go back.”
Babe nodded. “Did you talk to mom while she was here?”
“Yeah, sure. We talk on the phone sometimes. Hell, sometimes we talk for a long time. More than we did when…well. Yeah, I even had lunch with them at their house last year when I was in Chicago.”
Babe shook his head. “I’ve never figured out how she could be married to you and then married to Rick Richmond. You two aren’t anything alike. What am I missing?”
Robbie turned to stare into the flames, the fire light accentuating the intensity on his face. “I don’t think this is the best day for that discussion.”
“Maybe it is the best day for this discussion. Mom never explained anything. She only said that ‘your father and I had a mutual agreement that our betrothal had been an unfortunate mistake’. I always knew that that was bullshit, but of course I was forbidden to use the term ‘bullshit’ because ‘bullshit’ is a term used by the ‘low-life common people that plague our society’. How the fuck do you get to be such a snob when you’re from St Louis fucking Missouri?”
“Easy, big guy. This is your mother we’re talking about,” Robbie said, “as well as the home of ‘YOUUUUURRRRE St. Louis Cardinals.’ You were taken care of quite well after we split up. And that was, jeez, nineteen years ago?”
“Yeah, taken care of,” Babe said, nodding.
“I was pissed off, picked on, and I hated that junior high school with a passion. My grades sucked and I couldn’t stand the way Mom and Rick were acting about that. That landed me in Boston at Faraday Prep School, alma mater of the famous Rick Richmond. I’m sure it looked like he was providing me with ‘opportunity’, while keeping me away from his precious career.
“Dad, do you realize that if
Rick had been divorced instead of a widower he would never have married Mom? Because that’s the way politics works. Your wife dies in a car wreck, you can remarry. Wife dies from cancer, thumbs down. Not okay. A widower gets the voters’ sympathy but a divorcee is a skirt-chasing son-of-a-bitch. But a widower is allowed to marry a divorced woman as long as there is no scandal waiting to be discovered—because the polls say so.
“Jesus H. Christ. Who wrote these rules? I have no doubt that I ended up at Faraday’s because that’s where you send your unwashed step-children to have them whipped and scrubbed into respectable shape and worthy of a seat at the children’s table behind some Ken-doll asshole. Yes sir, I have been taken care of.”
Robbie rocked in his chair and stared into the fire.
“I’m sorry for not being around more, Josh. I was in a bad place for a long time after your mother left and took you away. But it looked like both of you were getting an upgrade. I’m sure not going to tell you what to say or what to feel. But I want you to know that I’m proud of you, and that I’ve missed you. It kills me to see you hurting and I wish I could take it away. I hope we can be friends.”
Babe nodded and reached to take hold of his father’s hand.
Robbie retired to his RV. Babe put out the fire and then followed Joe into the back yard while the puppy relieved himself for the night. Babe thought that Joe would go back to his pillow but he went to the door leading to the rest of the house. He sat down and waited. Babe picked up the pillow and carried it to his bedroom. He laid it down beside his bed. Joe curled up on the pillow and was asleep immediately.
Babe lay down and as soon as his body come to rest, the grief that had been at bay for most of the day flooded his mind. But he had expected that.