A Permanent Member of the Family

by Russell Banks

  But that was a long while ago, and since then she’s been his only companion here behind the fence, while on the other side of the fence, people have come and gone, they’ve stared at him and been scared of him, and have aimed lights and cameras at him for a TV audience. The whole neighborhood has come by and looked at him and her, too, as if they were animals in a zoo. By now he must be used to Ventana’s presence, as if they are cage mates, not enemies.

  Slowly she hitches her way to the edge of the roof and, more open-minded than before, carefully, calmly, almost objectively, examines the dog. She’s still frightened, but the sight of him no longer panics her. He’s large for a pit bull, maybe fifty or sixty pounds—she’s seen many examples of the breed in the neighborhood walking with that characteristic bowlegged, chesty strut, in the company of young men wearing baggy pants halfway down their underwear, tight muscle shirts and baseball caps on backward, boys who are barely men and resemble their dogs the way people say dogs and their owners and husbands and wives come to resemble each other. She knows some of those young men personally, has known them since they were little boys. Inside they’re not hard and dangerous; they’re soft and scared. That’s why they need to walk the streets with a hard, dangerous-looking dog yanking on a chain-link leash.

  She notices that the dog has been watching her with his yellow eyes half opened. He still hasn’t moved, except for the rise and fall of his barrel-hooped chest—he’s breathing through his nose, with his lipless mouth closed over his teeth like a giant python. A good sign, she thinks. She lets her legs dangle over the windshield of the vehicle, her feet almost touching the hood. The dog doesn’t stir.

  “What’s your name, dog?” She almost laughs at the question. She can call him whatever she wants and that’ll be his name, at least for tonight. She wonders if he belongs to the black salesman or the skinny white one. She doesn’t know what a tattooed white man would name his guard dog, but if he’s owned by the black man his name would be something country and southern, like Blue. She remembers a line from an old song, I had a dog and his name was Blue . . .

  “Hey, Blue, you gonna let the nice lady come down?”

  At the sound of her voice the dog lifts his massive head, looks up at Ventana for a few seconds, then lowers his head again, watching her with eyes wide open now, his small ears tipped forward, his forehead rippled as if with thought. Ventana remembers some more lines from the song and sings them to him. She has a thin, almost reedy singing voice:

  You know Blue was a good ol’ dog,

  Treed a possum in a hollow log.

  You know from that he was a good ol’ dog . . .

  Ol’ Blue’s feet was big and round,

  Never ’lowed a possum to touch the ground . . .

  No response from Blue, which she decides is a good sign, so she slides forward, and when her feet touch the hood of the car, she stands up. Feet apart, hands on her hips, shoulders squared, she believes she is the picture of self-confidence and good intentions. “Well, well, Blue,” she says, smiling. “What do you make of this? I’m starting to think we’re gonna be friends, you and me.”

  Blue stands, squares his shoulders similarly and appears to smile back. He whips his tail like a piece of steel cable back and forth in a friendly-seeming way and droops his ears in a manner that suggests submission to Ventana, as if he’s decided that for the moment, until his owner shows up, she’s the boss. Must be his owner is the black man, she thinks, since he’s so relaxed around black people. Maybe the white man’s not the boss, like she originally thought. She decided earlier that when she got out of here, whether it happened tonight or tomorrow morning, she would not come back and test-drive and buy a vehicle from Sunshine Cars USA. But now she’s thinking maybe she will.

  She sits down on the hood and tells Blue face-to-face that she’s going to walk over to the gate in the fence and try to climb over it. “Sorry to leave you, ol’ Blue, but I got to get home,” she explains. “I got to work tomorrow, and I need my sleep.”

  Keeping the silver Ford between them, still not taking her eyes off the dog, she slides her feet from the hood of the car to the ground and takes a short step away from the vehicle. Blue has watched her descent, and except to stand up and flip his tail back and forth has not reacted, has not even blinked. For the first time since she left the roof of the car, she takes her eyes off him—a ten-second trial. When she turns back he has not moved or changed his expression. He’s watching her almost as if he’s glad she’s leaving, as if her departure will relieve him of duty and he’ll be free to find a quiet spot in the lot to sleep away the rest of the night.

  “Okay, I’m going now,” she says. “Goodbye, Blue.”

  Ventana walks slowly along the fence toward the locked gate three car lengths away. She doesn’t look back at Blue, and she doesn’t walk tentatively; she walks like someone who is not afraid, faking it the same way she entered the lot hours earlier. She was afraid then, too, but only of buying a car, of being outsmarted by the salesman—or saleswoman, if she ended up buying it from the young Latina. She was afraid that the car would turn out to be a lemon, rusting on cinder blocks in her backyard, used up; that depositing one hundred dollars in the credit union at the end of every month for three long years would be wasted. Now she is afraid that she has dangerously misread a guard dog’s intentions and desires. Though she walks with seeming confidence, she may be sacrificing herself to a set of obscure but nonetheless sacred principles of property and commerce. She is afraid of the blinding pain that will come if the guard dog attacks her. And for a second she lets herself imagine the awful relief that will come when only death can take away the pain. Her night has come to that.

  She remembers another verse from that old song, but this time sings it silently to herself:

  Old Blue died and I dug his grave,

  I dug his grave with a silver spade.

  The chained and padlocked gate is wide enough to drive a car through if it were open. Just below the top of the eight-foot-tall spikes is a horizontal steel pipe that she believes she is tall enough to reach. She adjusts her purse so the strap crosses her chest and the bag hangs against her back. She reaches up and on tiptoes grabs the pipe. She pulls herself a few inches off the ground, then a few more, until she’s high enough to work her right elbow through the spikes and over the pipe. Holding her weight with her upper right arm, she uses it as a fulcrum to swing her left foot up, above the pipe and through the spikes. With her left foot wedged between them, she is able to grab onto the spikes with both hands and pull herself high enough to see over the gate. She suddenly remembers the last lines of the verse:

  I let him down with a silver chain,

  And every link I called his name.

  The empty streets and sidewalks out there, the darkened stores and warehouses and homes, the whole vast dark city itself, all seem to go on endlessly into the night. She is about to free herself from this cage. She is escaping into the city. Her right leg hangs in the air a few feet off the ground behind her. The dog doesn’t growl or snarl. He doesn’t even breathe loudly. He is silent and strikes like a snake. He clamps onto her leg with his powerful jaws and drags her backward, off the gate.

  THE INVISIBLE PARROT

  Guy walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder . . .

  Actually Billy walks into a neighborhood grocery store, not a bar, and he’s only pretending he has a parrot on his shoulder. He’s trying to think of a new version of an old joke. When Billy’s depressed or scared—and this morning he’s both—he has imaginary conversations with himself.

  The place is a combination grocery-liquor-cigar store smelling of three-day-old fish, sour milk and tobacco, on Alton Road a block north of Lincoln, between the hotels on the beach and the condos on the bay. Squeezed between a Burger King and a massage parlor, the store is dim and dingy—four narrow, crowded aisles with a single cash register operated by a thin Chinese woman in her fifties. Her arms are crossed and she’s gazing at the ceiling deep i
n thought when Billy strolls in with his invisible parrot. He stops here several times a week on his way to or from work at the hotel and he sort of knows her, although they’ve never really talked.

  She ignores him and he feels himself and the parrot fade. He figures she’s compounding variable interest rates on randomly chosen sums and doesn’t want to interrupt her calculations to say, Hello, good morning, young man. What a pretty bird! To which the parrot would say, Thank you, ma’am. I’d like today’s Miami Herald with the weekend real estate listings and a map of the city. My apartment has been condemned by the city and I need to find a clean, inexpensive place to live that accepts humans. Ha, ha.

  There are two other people in the store—a tall gray-faced black woman in her thirties and a slump-shouldered middle-aged Chinese man with a clipboard, probably the husband of the cashier, counting dented cans in aisle two and positioning the cans on the shelves to hide the dents. The black woman has voluminous hips stuffed into too-tight jeans and wears a dark green company uniform shirt with Charlotte sewn onto the right breast pocket. She looks like she’s been up all night cleaning bathrooms at Mount Sinai Medical Center. He was up all night, too, packing his belongings to move out of his condemned apartment. He knows how she feels. Sort of. She feels hopeless. And invisible. But not to him: Billy sees her, and if he can see her—if one other person can know that’s she’s alive and in spite of everything still kicking—then she needn’t feel hopeless, right? Same for him, if one other person can see him.

  She picks up a liter of Diet Pepsi with one hand and a bag of potato chips with the other and lugs them to the register. Billy removes a newspaper from the rack and takes a city map from a second rack clipped to the wall. The black woman and Billy reach the register at the same time. She shoots Billy a sharp look: another pushy young white man. Not him. No way. He turns and checks out the candy stand.

  She plunks the plastic jug and chips on the counter, sighs audibly and waits for the Chinese woman to acknowledge her presence. The black woman clears her throat, gets no response. She works a wrinkled envelope from her back pocket and studies a list written on it. Pressing the envelope flat on the counter she plucks a ball-point pen from a jar of pens next to the register, leans over the envelope and checks off the first two items on her list. Billy looks around her shoulder and reads the words written on the envelope in large hand-drawn capitals:

  ATM

  FOOD

  PAY ELECTRIC

  GET HAIR DONE

  CALL ETHYLEEN

  Something about the list tightens Billy’s stomach into a fist. It’s as if her whole life is written there. Charlotte will have already gone to the ATM and run her twenty-something-dollar bank balance down to zero. Check. Now she buys a liter of Diet Pepsi and a bag of potato chips for breakfast. Check. After Charlotte eats her breakfast sitting alone on a bench at the bus stop on Alton and Lincoln Road she’ll walk to the Florida Power & Light office at the Stop & Shop on West, where she’ll pay her overdue electric bill in cash because her checks have bounced too many times. Check. Charlotte will head for Jeannie’s Cut-Right Cut-Rate Beauty Nook to get a wave put back in her hair. Seven bucks. Check. Now that she’s feeling pretty Charlotte will buy a dollar phone card and call Ethyleen on her cell phone to tell her about it. Check. Then she’ll take the bus back to Overton and walk to her building and step over toys and trash and broken glass up to her third-floor apartment. She has a teenage son who’s supposed to be in school but is shooting hoops over at Franklin Park and an unemployed boyfriend who says he’s looking for a job but has long since given that up and instead hangs in the ’hood getting high with his posse. She’ll draw the shades in the cluttered bedroom, take off her clothes and put on a shortie nightgown. She’ll set the alarm clock for 5:00 P.M. so she can make it back to the hospital in time. The night shift. Charlotte wraps her hair in a scarf, lies down in the unmade bed and immediately falls asleep. Check.

  That’s it, her life’s checklist. Billy wonders what kind of list he’d make that would do the same for him.

  BUY NEWSPAPER AND CITY MAP

  FIND NEW PLACE TO LIVE

  GO TO WORK

  ASK TO GET PROMOTED FROM BUSBOY TO WAITER

  MOVE STUFF TO NEW PLACE AFTER WORK

  Five items—the same number on his list as on Charlotte’s. Suddenly he’s angry at the Chinese woman for making Charlotte wait for no good reason. The woman seems to be deliberately ignoring him and his new friend.

  “Hey, Missus! You got payin’ customers here!”

  The Chinese woman slowly turns and looks at him. She’s chewing on a toothpick. For a few seconds she studies the items in his hands—the newspaper and map—and the two in Charlotte’s—Diet Pepsi and bag of chips. She switches the toothpick from one side of her mouth to the other.

  “Why you in such a big hurry?”

  He’s embarrassed now and wishes he’d let Charlotte make the complaint or just waited until the lady was ready to take their money. “I . . . I got to take a piss.”

  “No public restroom here.”

  The woman ambles to the register and rings up Charlotte’s Diet Pepsi and chips and drops them into a plastic bag. Charlotte pays with four singles, grabs the change and without looking back walks quickly out to the street. Billy jiggles and hops up and down a couple of times as if he really does have to take a piss. The Chinese woman moves in slow motion, picks up his newspaper and map from the counter and runs them under the scanner.

  When he opens his wallet all he has are two singles and a twenty. His last twenty till payday. The paper and the map together come to $6.45. He passes the twenty to the woman.

  “This all you got? Too early to make change.”

  “Where can I get it changed?”

  “Go to bank on the corner. They open at nine.”

  “That’s like an hour and a half. I gotta get to work.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “I only got enough change for the paper.”

  “So buy paper.”

  Billy pays her with two quarters and makes for the door where he stops and turns back. “You know that woman in front of me?”

  “She come in here all the time.”

  “So why did you make her wait like that? Seriously. That wasn’t nice, lady.”

  “She on drugs. She all the time try to steal from us. Goodbye,” the Chinese lady says and slams shut the cash drawer. She folds her arms across her chest again and goes back to her calculations.

  Billy steps outside to the sunlit street. And there is Charlotte waiting for him. She looks plaintively into his eyes. He turns away and starts walking toward Lincoln.

  “Can you help me out, mister? I got to get to my job in North Miami an’ I need another dollar for the bus.”

  Billy stops and checks her out top to bottom. She’s not the same person she was a minute ago. She’s changed from being invisible to everyone but Billy into a junkie visible to all. Probably a clucker, a crackhead. “What about the money you just spent in there for junk food? That was enough for a bus to North Miami.”

  “I thought I had enough leftover, but I was wrong. I . . .”

  “What about your list?”

  “What list?”

  “On the envelope. I seen it.”

  She pulls the same envelope from her back pocket and examines it. “You want it? I’ll give it to you for a buck.”

  “I mean the things you wrote there.”

  “It was on the floor. Sometimes people lose envelopes with money in ’em. Even Chinese people.”

  “How come you checked things on the list? Like food and ATM.”

  She shrugs. “Why not?”

  “Is your name Charlotte? Like it says on your shirt?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You got any spare change, then?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck you, then.”

  Slowly Billy pulls his wallet from his back pocket. He flips it open and removes the twenty-dollar bill and passes it to
her. She takes the bill without looking at it and stuffs it into her back pocket.

  She hands him the envelope.

  “No thanks,” he says.

  “It’s yours now. You bought it, mister.”

  Billy waves his hands in front of his face.

  The woman crumples the envelope in her fist and tosses it onto the sidewalk. “You have a nice day,” she says and walks away.

  For a full minute Billy stands and watches her. The parrot on his shoulder says, Easy come easy go. Finders keepers losers weepers. What goes around comes around.

  Billy says to the parrot, “Just shut the fuck up.”

  THE OUTER BANKS

  Ed pulled the RV off the road and parked it in a small paved lot, the front bumper kissing the concrete barrier, the large pale gray vehicle facing the sea, and Alice said, “Why are we stopping?”

  The rain came in curtains off the Atlantic, one after the other, like the waves breaking against the sand, only slower, neither building nor diminishing. The couple watched the rain and the waves through the wide, flat windshield. There were no other vehicles in the lot and none in sight on the coastline road behind them. It was late fall, and the summer houses and rental cottages and motels were closed for the season.

  “I don’t know why. I mean, I do know. Because of the dog.” He cracked open his window and relighted the cold stub of his cigar, and for a long while the couple sat in silence.

  Finally she said, “So these are the famous Outer Banks of North Carolina.”

  “Yeah. Sorry about the weather,” he said. “‘Graveyard of the Atlantic,’ Alice.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Joke, Alice? Joke?”

  She didn’t answer him. A moment passed, and he said, “We’ve got to do something about the dog. You know that.”