Dog on the Cross

by Aaron Gwyn

  DAYS OF AVOIDING his housemate, immersing himself in dictionaries, copying passages from the OED. Nights of tending bar, monitoring Wisnat, making Megan her off–White Russians. He tracks the origin of words like perfidy. Grinds, between spoons, pill after pill.

  Weeks of such activity bled together. Jansen watched each evening for the drug to take effect, saw nothing but a rash on the woman’s cheeks. Though he had hoped for Wisnat’s quick success, Jansen soon grew so troubled that he immediately wished the entire business done. At first, he feared the pills might be Rohypnol, known in the media as the date-rape drug. But Rohypnol, Jansen learned, had an immediate effect, and whatever he was giving this woman didn’t seem to be working at all, unless the goal was merely to chap her face. Perhaps, he figured, Wisnat had purchased some kind of aphrodisiac, answered an ad in the back of Rolling Stone. Having flirted with similar ideas himself, Jansen knew that, whatever their promises, these pills were worthless.

  He had begun to grow accustomed to Megan. For the first time, the bartender could entertain the possibilities of having a woman as a friend. It was obvious that she had developed a minor crush—perfectly innocent, thought Jansen, completely natural. It was also clear to him that even if Wisnat had permitted, he could hardly have returned her feelings. While he enjoyed speaking with her—thought her amusing and sincere—sexually, his reactions were of indifference. And, as if sensitive to his response, the woman, it seemed to Jansen, began to withdraw.

  She continued, regardless, to frequent the Gusher. For weeks, she was faithful as ever. But the insecurities Megan had confessed seemed gradually to deepen, her confidence to steadily deflate. The bartender supposed this was a function of his refusing to promote her advances, but then he knew differently. Megan had developed the look of one wrestling with something, her expression going from shock, to frustration, to distress. He had seen the same progression in Wisnat when the man began losing his hair.

  It was not worth it, Jansen finally concluded; it simply wasn’t right. He had poured the entire bottle of pills down the sink when she abruptly quit coming.

  Jansen did not have time to question her disappearance, for immediately his attention was focused on Wisnat. From the time the pills began going into Megan’s drinks, Wisnat’s unease had been apparent. He sat, no longer passive, beneath the dartboard, bouncing his knees, drinking bourbon, staring expectantly at the woman, his eyebrows slanting more solemnly that ever. She’d seemed not to notice him, this man leaning forward in his chair as if toward a film whose climax had arrived. Jansen had looked at Wisnat, incapable of comprehending his strategy. Why didn’t he try and talk to her? For what, wondered Jansen, was he waiting?

  When Megan quit coming to the bar, Wisnat’s anxiety seemed to double. Unable now to study the woman, he sat at the counter observing the door, checking his watch, asking the bartender once more about the odds of her coming in. Jansen claimed not to know. He was disgusted with Wisnat, disgusted with himself. He despised the situation thoroughly, the part he’d played in it. Most of all he hated that after the fiasco was at an end, his emotions compelled him to reassure a man who was by all accounts a criminal.

  There were nights when Wisnat would sit and stare at the entrance, and nights when he would interrogate Jansen, and nights when both men would begin drinking and be forced to have a cab conduct them home. Nights of narrowly averted arguments and migraine headaches and silences that would last for hours at a stretch. And finally there was the night (the beginning in Perser of Derrick Days, the town’s annual celebration of its oil boom) when Jansen emerged from the storeroom into a packed house and saw that Megan had returned, that she was sitting, not in her usual spot, but as far from the counter as possible, by herself at a shadowed table; and walking toward her he saw for the first time that she was wearing makeup, and not just a light foundation or brush of rouge but a heavy covering agent intended to hide the most serious blemishes; and when he came closer, when the crowd parted and the light from the MILLER GENUINE sign illumined her face, Jansen saw, at long last, the effects of Wisnat’s pills, saw on this woman’s face, where the makeup was thickest, the shadow cast on her upper lip, not by her nose or the various objects depending from the walls (neon signs and lamps, the rack holding eleven damaged cues) but rather by a blond and slightly velveteen mustache.

  THERE WAS BARELY room to stand and the noise was deafening, customers lined for much of the night, around the counter, obscure gestures signaling their choices of drink. Derrick Days was a popular event, known among the residents of towns throughout central Oklahoma. For years the Gusher had figured as one of its most prominent attractions. As soon as the first hint of summer dusk descended, people drove out in search of alcohol. They came in from firework shows, from the community center, from Parson’s Field where the tractor pull was held. Their cars choked the parking lot, contending, in spectacle, with the revival not a mile down the road.

  All that evening Jim Peters had been taunting the young man Jansen hired to help him on busier occasions, a red-haired college student by the name of Sparks. Peters took it as an affront that there should be someone of Sparks’s age who had aspirations toward higher ed, and the drunker he became the more stabbing were his insults.

  “What you need to go to college for anyway?” he was asking Sparks. “Cain’t you already count?”

  Wade, from a few stools over, ejected a snort. “Maybe he wants to be president.”

  “Shit,” Peters told him, “he don’t need college for that.”

  Sparks continued wiping at the counter. “You guys are real comedians,” he said.

  “Well, I’m glad you think so,” Peters responded. Reaching across the counter, he put an enormous hand into Sparks’s hair, mussed it.

  Sparks retreated, realigned, with his fingers, the part. “Quit it,” he warned.

  Jansen, not wanting to deal with a brawl, asked Sparks to help him pull several cases of vodka from the back. The two of them walked toward the storeroom, the bartender cautioning the young man about getting into a scuffle with the larger and more aggressive veteran.

  Emerging, Jansen carried a box of liquor toward the counter and noticed Megan at her table. He’d started toward her across the bar—skirting tables, dodging clusters of drunks—reached a certain point, and then, stopping in midstep, registered with horror, the mustache, the results of the barber’s enterprise. It flooded in on him, the entirety of Wisnat’s plan. For several moments, he did not breathe.

  Abruptly, a stranger at a nearby table gave a tug on Jansen’s sleeve. “I think your buddy’s in trouble,” said his voice. Glancing behind him, shaken from his thoughts, Jansen saw that a case of vodka lay broken on the floor. There was a large commotion and then a ring of men, two figures struggling in its center. Between a pair of upraised and riotous arms, Jansen watched Peters twirl Sparks and twist him into a half nelson.

  “Come on,” the man was saying, veins articulating along the insides of his arms, “give us a hug.”

  “Yeah,” said Wade, “give him a hug.”

  The bartender rushed over, helped loosen Peters’s grip, asked the man to let Sparks go. Peters went gradually slack and then released his captive altogether. Jansen conducted him swiftly from the ring, cries of disappointment general in the room.

  “Aw,” begged Peters, “don’t take my little Sparkie away.”

  Shaking his head, Jansen brought Sparks behind the counter, tried to calm him. The boy slung a towel spectacularly at the bar, cast Peters an indignant look. “Fat fuck,” he said, under his breath.

  Jansen glanced quickly toward Megan’s table, noticing that Wisnat—the man had been invisible up till then; the bartender was not even aware of his attendance—was standing there talking to her. Megan was nodding.

  “What’s that?” said Peters, interrupting Jansen’s attempts to project his hearing. He rose, again, to his feet, swayed back and forth. “What’d you say?”

  Sparks stood for a moment. Jansen tried to dr
aw him back to the storeroom, but the boy maneuvered out of the bartender’s grip. From the corner of his eye he saw Wisnat pull back a chair, sit down next to Megan.

  Sparks leaned over the bar, brought his face against Peters’s. “Fat fucking fuck,” he slowly enunciated, spraying spit across the veteran’s glasses.

  Peters threw back his head and began laughing, Jansen exhaling in relief. Then Peters grabbed Sparks, drug him over the counter, and tossed him in the floor, wedging both knees in the young man’s chest.

  “Get off me,” came the muffled voice of Sparks. “The fuck off me.”

  Peters unbuckled his belt and began to lower his pants. “This fat man’s going to shit right in your skinny, little face,” he said.

  It took four men to lift Peters off Sparks. When they seated him in his stool he sat there pointing at the boy, laughing. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch,” he informed the bar. “I judged the chili cook-off this afternoon.”

  Laughter. The mock screams of women.

  Jansen, untucking the front of his shirt to mop at his face, asked Wade to call a cab. It arrived almost instantly, Peters asleep the moment he was crammed inside. When Jansen walked back into the bar and began searching around, he saw that Megan was gone. The barber as well.

  Locating Sparks, he asked where he went.

  “Where who went?” The boy was standing behind the counter with an icepack on his forehead, a look in his eyes of rage and relief.

  “Wisnat,” repeated Jansen, “where is he?”

  “Left,” Sparks told him, motioning to the rear exit. He sat the icepack on the bar and miniature streams of water ran toward its edge. “Went out the back with some bimbo.”

  IT WAS AFTER two when the last of them stumbled out, lights from a dozen cars fanning, at various angles, the bar’s rear wall. Walking to the center of the room, Jansen collapsed into a chair. All of the windows facing the highway were smeared with fingerprints, and there was a word greased on the outside pane that he could not make out. He sat for some time, attempting to decipher it, feeling, of a sudden, as if he were going to be ill.

  Rising, he began to busy himself with cleaning the room. There were crushed beer nuts strewn across the floor and ashtrays brimming with half-smoked cigarettes, matchbooks laid out in ominous patterns, arranged by an anonymous seer. On one of the tables someone had constructed a miniature castle out of straws and Michelob bottles. The bartender left this fortress intact, picked up the larger items and washed the dishes, swept the floors and wiped the countertop. He went behind the bar, ejected the register’s tray, tallied the currency into careful stacks, zipped all of it into a First National bag. Glancing into the mirror, he saw a pair of lights strobe the roadside windows, come glaring up, cut to darkness. He heard a car door slam, the front door open. Tossing the bank bag beneath the counter, he turned. Wisnat stood before him, his face bled of the hopelessness and anxiety that had been so long engraved there, his brows not even reverting to their familiar, dissatisfied slope. There was a new expression on the man’s face, one, it almost seemed, of contentment. He walked to where Jansen had been sitting and pulled back a chair.

  As Jansen had cleaned the bar, he’d contemplated how he would approach the man, what he might say. Numerous insults and chastisements ran through his mind, each more severe than the one before. Now, with Wisnat seated barely fifteen feet away, the bartender found himself at a loss. He was choked with anger, with bitterness and a sense of betrayal, but he did not know how to begin, how to give these things utterance. Perhaps there was something insufficiently developed about his thoughts, or he’d simply not had time to process them. Perhaps, Jansen realized, his tongue was rendered paralytic by the same force that had halted his words since he was a child.

  He went over and took a seat opposite Wisnat. The two sat staring at each other, at the walls, at the table between them. When Jansen could no longer take it, he leaned forward in his chair.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?” replied his friend.

  The bartender felt himself beginning a retreat, but then recognized he had to, regardless of the discomfort, make a stand.

  “I saw what you did,” he said.

  “What I did?”

  Jansen ignored this. “They were some kind of hair pill, weren’t they? You gave her some kind of growth hormone.”

  Crossing his arms, the barber shook his head, looked, in blatant disinterest, toward the window. “You, you, you,” he muttered under his breath.

  “All right then,” said Jansen, “we.”

  Wisnat gestured toward his friend. “Try and remember that.”

  “Why would I forget?”

  “You’re just as much to blame as I am.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, not ‘maybe.’”

  “Fine,” said Jansen, “I’m to blame.”

  Wisnat, momentarily appeased, wiped a hand across his face, and the two once again grew quiet. Jansen felt as if his efforts had been undermined, and looking at the barber something in him crumpled. He began to wonder if he could forget the events of the previous month, if they could just go ahead now that the unpleasantness was at an end.

  “Anyway,” he began in a friendlier tone, “I suppose it’s over.”

  “Suppose what’s over?”

  “Megan,” Jansen told him, motioning vaguely. “I suppose you’re done with all of that.”

  “What makes you think I’m done?”

  Jansen didn’t understand. “I mean,” he said, laughing nervously, “that that’s usually it. Once you—”

  “We didn’t have sex, if that’s what you’re fumbling around.”

  The bartender simply looked at the man. He didn’t understand this either.

  “Then where have you been?”

  “Excuse me, Dad.”

  “I’m serious, Dennis. Where were you all this time?”

  “I don’t think I have to tell you.”

  “You were with her?”

  The barber took a napkin from the dispenser and began tearing it into strips.

  “You were with Megan, right?”

  “You know, Jansen,” Wisnat told him, “you’re very fucked up.”

  “I’m fucked up?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  Jansen felt blood rushing to his head. He was angry, but there was something alongside the anger, something he’d not experienced even in the days when he witnessed his friend’s conquests. He was, it briefly occurred to him, jealous.

  “You want to keep seeing her?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said, “it is my business. You made it my—”

  “Jesus.”

  “Please quit.”

  “Quit what?”

  Jansen broke off, cast around as if looking for someone to assist. “Just give me an answer, Wisnat. Just a plain, simple answer. Stop worrying about whether or not it’s my—”

  “Fine,” said Wisnat, straightening in his chair and scooting to its edge, “what do you want to know?”

  “Do-you-want-to-see-her-again?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” he said.

  “Because—”

  “Because of the pills?”

  The bartender nodded.

  Wisnat looked to his feet. “That has nothing to do with it,” he explained. “Is it that hard for you to understand me wanting to be with someone else?”

  Jansen noticed that he was standing, though he would never recall rising to his feet. His breath was coming in spurts and his hands were shaking so badly that he grabbed the edge of the table to steady them.

  “Why?” he managed, his voice starting to crack.

  Wisnat sat for several minutes as if choosing, carefully, his words. Finally, he looked up at Jansen, gave a brief smile. He asked the bartender if it would be too difficult to believe that he might just be in love.

  There follow
ed a period Jansen could not remember, a stretch of compressed time, filled, he thought, with screaming and (perhaps) a momentary scuffle, twenty years of words spilling nonsensically and in no particular order from his mouth. When he came to, he had Wisnat by the collars, pressed against the wall. He was repeating the word right, unable to decide if it was a question or an answer or some ambiguous curse. Throughout, Wisnat’s face remained surprisingly tranquil, as if this were something he’d been expecting all along.

  Jansen grew suddenly quiet and his hands went slack. Wisnat took them carefully from his shirt and helped his housemate to a seat. The barber knelt in front of him, between Jansen’s knees, placed a hand on either side of the man’s face, cradling it almost. He exhaled a long breath, shook his head and then, with a resigned look—one that suggested having to finally speak of things better left unsaid—brought the bartender’s face toward his, told him that he understood much more than Jansen thought. Wisnat explained that the darkness that hovered over him, had for the very first time lifted, that he could see clearly, as if the world had become transparent. He told Jansen that he had always been a good friend to him, that he appreciated it, but that all things drew toward an end. This, he explained, he must simply accept.

  Finally, he told how there was something about Megan that Jansen did not yet comprehend, something he couldn’t talk about, but that it made him feel necessary, almost required. Before Jansen could comment, before he could even open his mouth, Wisnat told him he need not worry himself over this. That he could be of no help in the matter. That such a thing could not be satisfied by one of his kind.

  OCTOBER 5 OF THE subsequent year, Dennison Lee Wisnat and Megan Renee Thomas were pronounced man and wife. They flew out on a Thursday afternoon for Las Vegas, Nevada, and returned the following week. The gossip section of The Perser Chronicle mentioned that the two planned on taking as many trips as possible before raising a family. Jansen, reading the article several times before disposing of it, pondered the reporter’s claim that this couple had a great deal in common. He could not, after some thought on the matter, help but agree.