You could do anything you wanted, I thought then. Anything at all.
He walked dripping out of the water. It poured off him in streams that ran back into the ocean, where they gave up their edges and shape and became again indistinguishable, as if they’d never pressed against him. Sea foam clung to his ribs and knees before dissolving in the wind. He sat heavily beside me in the sand and kissed me, his wet lips salty, the hair on his legs burning gold in the sun. Its light fell full and hard down on him, burned away another layer of his skin. I loved to touch those tender, sunburnt spots: how he tensed against the twinge of pain, how my white fingerprints on his chest filled back in with red.
We’re not together in any of the photographs. It was reckless enough just to walk out in the open and the sun like that without going and asking some stranger, who might not turn out to be one after all when you got close enough, to take our picture. But we’ve still got all of them, in a cedar box at the top of the closet, with his medals from the war and his mama’s wedding rings, and as tenuously as they link us, they’re the only real evidence that any of it ever happened, that we were ever even in the same vicinity. The rest we got rid of, if it ever existed at all. We never wrote each other love letters, anything someone might find, and he never came to my shop at the same time two days in a row, or by the same path through the downtown streets and alleys. Once I went to throw some carcasses in the trash can out back—the big noticeable ones I had to haul off myself, but the smaller ones, squirrels and possums and owls, I tossed in the trash can and nobody was the wiser—only to find him crawling on hand and knee down the alley to stay below the line of sight of some poor tenement family eating their gruel in the window above.
“So nobody can establish a pattern,” he said, real gruff and clipped, looking up at me from the ground.
He was the most worried about his mama. He was the only one she had left, after all—his older brother Harvey and his baby sister Iris had both died from consumption when he was a boy. It’s strange, now, to think about how many and often people died when we were children. It was happening all the time. Everybody had brothers and sisters, more than one, usually, who never saw their tenth birthday. So many people survive these days. Everybody lives so awfully long.
She was always trying to send him courting some girl she’d just met, and talking about how empty that old house felt, and how she sure would like to have some grandchildren someday to fill it back up. She was supposedly not in the best of health, had dizzy spells and heart palpitations and ‘the vapors,’ she called it. I was never convinced that was anything but a ploy to keep his attention.
But I didn’t blame him. For protecting her, for protecting himself. He’d lost enough already, felt enough pain. I didn’t want him to know how it felt to fumble for an excuse, to stammer and redden and try to explain without explaining the compromised position in which he’d been found; I didn’t want him to see the change in his mother’s eyes as the stain of understanding spread through them, seeping back through every memory and forward into every hope, so that no matter which way she looked, every sight of him was tinged with filth and soaked in sorrow.
I’d never met her, never even seen her from afar, but I felt her pull on us all the time, every minute we were together, even lying there on the beach in the hot sun. It wasn’t something we argued or even talked about, but a fundamental underlying force, like all forces invisible, that shaped our every surge toward each other and our every drifting apart, as if she was some enormous, distant mass so far away you couldn’t see it but so heavy and dense it warped all the space around it, curved it so sharp that by seven, seven-thirty every night, he started to look down at his feet, and out the window at the darkening sky, and every straight line I tried to pull him along into the hot night, no matter how fast and sure, bent into an arc that carried him back to her in time for dinner at eight. And so the closest any of those pictures come to showing the two of us together is my blurred fingertip, creeping in at the edge of one of them like the first dark sliver of the moon, invisible in the bright sky until just that moment, beginning to pass across the sun.
A storm blew up that night, a pretty bad one out of the east. I could feel it building all afternoon, slowly knotting the air into a bruise out over the waves, the ocean turning back on themselves the river waters that were supposed to run into it, and as the sun set Frank sat in the worn rocking chair out on the sagging front stoop of the shack, smelling like salt and sand, his hair ruffled with it—I loved the way his hair smelled when we came in from the beach, never wanted him to shower—and with his clasped hands pressed to his lips watched the storm clouds muscle their way through the drowsy evening light. He was always real funny about the weather. He wouldn’t take a shower during a storm, wouldn’t even wash his hands, thought the lightning would travel through the pipes and pour out the tap, crackle pink and branching all over him. His mama and her people had taken some kind of religiously-inspired pioneer trek to the Midwest when she was a girl, before they ran into a pack of unneighborly Indians and some mild cyclones and retreated back to God’s Country, having decided that they’d misinterpreted the previous signs and that it was, in fact, His Country after all. When he was a boy, she made them all huddle in the closet any time she heard a rumble of thunder. He was always watching the sky, even on the brightest of days, waiting for clouds to curdle green.
I pulled him inside, and we sat in our swimsuits on either side of the table and played gin rummy while the clouds scraped across the stars. He stretched his legs under the table and propped his feet on my lap, cold as the other side of the pillow when I flipped it in the night. When I got hot, I held them to my chest to cool me down. I pressed their soles to my cheek.
Each individual drop of rain resounded on the tin roof, sounded like someone dumping an endless truckload of gravel down on top of us, and thunder rattled the window glass. The little shack shuddered and swayed. You could feel the wind itself every now and then, big whistling gusts blowing right between the boards. I was just a turn or two away from laying my whole hand on the table in victory, when suddenly he set his cards to the side and his feet on the floor and wiped his sweaty hands on his bare thighs.
“Let’s stop,” he said.
“Stop what?”
“This game,” he said, amazed that I could even consider such an activity at such a time. “We’ll probably need to make a run for it.”
I couldn’t help laughing. He looked highly insulted.
“A run for what?” I said.
“For anywhere but inside this rickety damn house. Before it falls in on us.”
I loved to hear him curse. He was always so wholesome.
“It’s just a storm,” I said.
“Just a storm? The whole house is swaying back and forth.”
“It’s supposed to sway,” I said. “It’s on little stilts.”
“It’s going to collapse.”
“It sways so it won’t collapse. That’s the whole point of the swaying. And even if it did collapse, these boards are so flimsy it probably wouldn’t hurt.”
“We ought to evacuate,” he said.
I laughed and clambered over the table, to the one window that looked toward the ocean. Rain ran down the glass; the clouds billowed and crumbled. Light peeled them back from a bright crack in the sky, as if day were breaking through night, before darkness closed over and sealed the wound.
“Get back from there.” His voice was high and strained. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you to stay away from windows during a storm?”
I loved his nervousness, I loved his fear. I loved the way his bare foot bounced nervously on the floor, as if barely restrained from running away.
“Come here,” I said. He shook his head. “I don’t know how you ever made it through a war like this.” And, as if being dragged by an invisible, overpowering force against his will, he took the two steps from the table to the wall.
He wrapped his arms around me from behind, r
ested his chin in my hair. “My mother would kill me,” he said, “if she knew I was exposing myself to the elements like this.”
“You sound like somebody’s mother right about now,” I said.
He squeezed me tight against him. Sand, caught in the hair on his chest, ground against my back.
Rain dripped through a leak in the ceiling and onto the table. The roar of the wind was indistinguishable from the roar of the waves, as if they were crashing against the walls, closing over the roof. It blew through the room in a cool current. The floor shook.
“This house is about to come apart,” he said.
Lightning ripped the clouds open and sewed the clouds shut. I leaned us against the sill, so he could feel the wind: how it passed through the boards of the house and between our bodies and kept on its way, how the storm moved right through us without disturbing a thing.
NINE
I’ve decided to get us a dog. We used to have one or two all the time, a couple purebred beagles, and a big, black German shepherd who dragged herself onto the porch one night as a puppy, ragged and so starved you could see her ribs plain through even that thick, downy undercoat, big chunks of which had been torn out. Fancy was the last one, another beagle, and it must have been twenty years ago she died. Frank wanted to get another one after her, but I couldn’t do it. She was real jealous, real possessive, and I just knew she’d be furious if we ever replaced her. But it’s rainy and gray outside, and the water’s running down the windows, and Frank’s lying in the bed, and the whole house is so quiet I can’t stand it, and a situation like this even she might make an exception for, so I leave him lying there and take myself down to the animal shelter. That’s where they say on TV you’re supposed to get your dogs anyway, so I’m feeling pretty good about that, thinking I’m doing the public a mighty fine service, my civic duty, until I actually get there. It’s about the most depressing establishment I’ve ever entered, all gray cinderblock walls and concrete floors with drains in them and water standing over the drains because they’re clogged up with dog hair, and the whole place divided into prison cells with chain-link fencing, and all the dogs howling in sorrow or barking at nothing at all. The people who work here look just about as miserable and trapped. They all drift around in a sort of shell-shocked daze.
The only creature in the entire building who isn’t keening and crying, the only one with a little equanimity about her, is some kind of basset hound mix—she’s got the basset’s long ears and stocky body, but some other blood’s pulled her face a little tighter so it doesn’t sag completely off her skull—sitting in the corner, as far from the others as she can get, silent and slumped against the fencing so her soft belly pushes through the open diamonds. Her head’s stooped low as if under some terrible shame, and her tail’s bent two thirds of the way down, at a perfect right angle, so its tip points upward. Some little boy, I bet, like one of those bastards next door, took it in his hand and snapped it.
The soiled sheet of paper clothespinned to the fence says her name is Daisy. And she’s already spayed and house-trained, which is what we need. I’m not too keen on scrubbing stains out of the carpet these days, or trying to keep a thing from chewing the stitches on her belly so it doesn’t spill wide open.
“Daisy,” I say.
Without raising her head, she casts her weary eyes up at me.
“I’ll take her,” I tell the skinny boy with rotten teeth following me around. He’s probably doing this is as community service, in penance for some minor crimes. He scoops her out of her cage and hooks a thin leash to her collar.
“Twenty-five bucks,” he says. Doesn’t even make me fill out any paperwork.
She curls up on a towel in the back seat, looking bored, but when we pull up to the pet store she whimpers with excitement and thumps her broken tail. She must be able to smell it from out here. I take her in to help me pick out her food and biscuits and bed, walk her up and down the aisles and let her sniff the bags of kibble until she pauses at one and starts nibbling the corner in her tiny front teeth, leaves it all crinkled like crepe paper. I only buy a small bag of it, even though you save a whole bunch of money when you get the bigger ones. I can’t carry a fifty-pound bag of dog food around anymore. Plus you want to make sure it agrees with her stomach before you go and buy a lifetime supply.
The bed aisle looks like some kind of luxury condominium resort. They’ve got dog beds that have a mattress and box spring, dog beds with silk duvets. One even has a wrought iron frame, complete with headboard. The checkout girl gives me a look of muted surprise and condemnation when I dare to buy one that’s just an oversized pillow.
At home, I lead her across the yard. The clouds are starting to thin out, the rain diffused into drizzle. The house is quiet when we walk in. First thing she does is pause in the doorway to stare at the raccoon that’s always creeping around the umbrella can. She waits a good while, transfixed, doesn’t move a thing but the bristling hair on her back and the pulsating sides of her nostrils, trying to close around and grip the long-faded smell of it.
“Come on,” I say. “You’d better meet Frank.” She keeps staring over her shoulder at it as we go.
He’s still in the bed, lying on his back with his shoulders drawn up, hands folded atop his chest like a damn corpse in the coffin. His eyes are closed, and his face is pinched tight, watching something painful in his dreams. It’s no wonder he has to sleep so much, if that’s the kind of rest he’s getting when he does.
“Wake up,” I say, prodding his shoulder.
“I’m all right.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “I’m fine. I’m just tired.”
“I’ve got a present for you.”
“I don’t want any presents.”
“You’d better. It ain’t going away any time soon.” I pat the bed beside his legs, and Daisy promptly hops right up and sits there, staring at him with the kind of solemn nobility you don’t expect in such a stumpy animal. Frank opens his eyes and stares back at her a long time in a parody of her graveness. He props himself up against the headboard, which rocks back and taps the wall where it’s scraped a feathered line into the paint. She sits nestled against him.
“There she is,” he says, scratching her under the chin. Her jowls pool in his hand, and she licks his wrist with a sideways swipe of the tongue. “Hey there, Fancy.”
“Fancy? Fancy’s been dead twenty years.”
He frowns, and his forehead wrinkles into thick, ponderous folds.
“She doesn’t even look like Fancy. She’s mostly basset.”
“I guess you’re right,” he says grudgingly. He gathers up the loose skin on the back of her head, pulling it taut over her face, stretching her eyelids back until they’re almost closed, and lets go, chuckling quietly as it sags.
“No guessing about it. I just picked her up from the pound. Name’s Daisy.”
He grimaces. “That’s an awful name.”
“I didn’t come up with it. But it’s too late to change now. She’s four years old. We’d give her an identity crisis.”
She roots around the sheets, snuffling loudly, then turns in a clumsy circle three times on his lap, her paws continually slipping off his legs, and lays herself down.
“Well,” he says, “I think we might get along all right anyway.”
“She probably needs some dinner. Lord knows what they were feeding her in that prison.”
“Stale bread and water,” Frank says.
I start for the door. Frank swings his legs over the side of the bed. His feet are swollen, and their tops are mottled purple. Daisy leaps down.
“I’ll do it,” he says.
Of course: no matter how I beg or plead, he won’t get out of the bed for me, but he’ll do it for some dog he’s just met. If I’d known it would be that easy, I’d have got us one three weeks ago.
“Get some clothes on,” I say. “I’ll bring everything in from the car.”
He tugs his pajama shirt over his head. He’s got an infes
tation, now, of shiny white spots, two on his forehead, three on his chest, and whole innumerable constellations across his shoulders and back, where the dermatologist had to dig out bits of cancer like mortar shrapnel from his skin.
Too much time in the sun when he was young, Frank told her. Too much exposure.
By the time I carry in the last sack, he’s sitting at the kitchen table, fully-dressed and pulling on his socks and shoes.
“You going someplace?” I say.
“Thought I might take her outside for a bit. Show her the lay of the land.” He smoothes his hair against his head. His neck looks long and thin, and his clothes are too big, and wrinkled as if he’d slept in them all this time. He sways a little when he stands, has to press his fingertips to the table.
“Are you sure you’re up to it?” I say.
He gives me a look of warning, and I don’t say any more. Instead I set the potatoes to boil for some potato salad. That’s his favorite. Usually I only make it for the holidays because it takes so long, between the potatoes and the eggs and the vegetables and the dressing, all the boiling and peeling and chopping, but I’ve got more reason to celebrate now than I ever do at Christmas.
He holds on to the counter while he lowers her food and water bowls to the floor. Seeing him bent down that far, it’s all I can do to keep myself from hurrying over to grab his elbow. His hands spill half the water from the bowl as he lowers it, but I wait until she’s gobbled up all her kibble without stopping to chew and he’s pulled all the tennis balls off the feet of his walker—“You ought to be glad I finally found a use for these old things,” he says, grinning, as he sits with the walker laid across his lap and tugs each ball free—and taken her out in the back yard before I clean it up.
I watch them through the open window over the sink. Frank hurls a tennis ball, and Daisy scuffles after it quick as she can, not by running so much as by folding and unfolding her stubby body in a way that launches her forward. Enough of the grass has fallen and died now that she can get around the yard a little easier, doesn’t have to wear a path through the wilderness. The ball bounces off the wall of the shed, and she gets it in her mouth and shakes her head back and forth like there’s a squirrel body attached to it and she’s got to snap the neck joining them.
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