Dog on the Cross

by Aaron Gwyn

  TODAY IS SUNDAY, hot and bright. I make coffee and lounge in my sweats, read till a quarter past noon.

  At one, I walk outside and circle the pickup. I open the passenger door and slide across the seat, noticing the layer of dust on the dashboard, the interior dull-looking and grim. I swipe a finger across it, rub the powder into my thumb. Opening the ashtray, I find a number of butts, the glove box brimming with receipts and playing cards, a tire gauge. I go back in the house and rifle through the utility closet. Ten minutes later I’m outside again, garden hose and bucket, Armor All and chamois. I wash the truck from license plate to hood, use my shop vac on the carpet.

  There’s a layer of sludge in the bed, and it’s pitted with bottle caps and acorns, crushed cans, faded bits of mail, twigs, empty tins of Skoal. I lower the tailgate and spray everything into my drive, sweep it into a pile, scoop it in the Dumpster. I examine the dints in the bed, the rusted spots, wondering how much it would cost to have them repainted. Prying the locks on the toolbox lids—there’s no key for them on the ring—I find that Kenneth has left me various tools about whose uses I can only speculate.

  Behind the seat there’s an ice scraper and jack, a pair of jumper cables, a wrench with a red rubber handle. There are also a number of smaller items—tape measure, chalk, mismatched gloves—and I pull a shoebox from underneath my bed, pile them inside it. I lock the doors, carry the box inside, and toss it on the living-room table. It’s five till four and I’m too exhausted to think about fixing dinner, about going to see Mother afterward. Though our argument was several days ago, I’m still having imaginary conversations with her, dreaming of insults I’ll never use. Not wanting to consider it further, I take the pack of cards from the top of the shoebox, open it, and slap the contents into my palm. I begin to shuffle, then flip through and study them one by one.

  As a child I’d collected cards. Not having a brother or sister, I spent a great deal of time developing tricks, playing solitaire. When we would take trips across country—Six Flags, Silver Dollar City, Walt Disney World—I would make Mother buy a different pack in each state. I have stacks of them in a closet somewhere, from casinos in Atlantic City and Vegas. It was, I’ll admit, a rather useless hobby, but the tricks I learned made it seem worthwhile, and every month I’d invent a new one, take the cards to school and show friends. I relished the looks on their faces when an ace from a crisp Taj Mahal deck turned up where it shouldn’t, when four kings from a Bally’s pack—bright white and red—lined up beneath their noses. But these cards, Uncle Kenneth’s cards, are like none I’ve ever seen.

  This has nothing to do with the fact that on the back of each there are photographs of naked women: I have similar sets that friends ordered me from Playboy. Nor are the depictions particularly lurid. Kenneth’s women adopt the standard poses, sit on their shins with their backs to the camera, stand with their hips projected and their legs slightly crossed.

  What is troubling about this deck of cards is that in each of the photographs the eyes of these women have been blacked out—a thin, dark line obscuring their glances, a perfectly rectangular blindfold drawn across their vision. I can’t quite understand why the image upsets me, and I go through the pack slowly, looking at each photo, trying to decide.

  I am so absorbed in this, so thoroughly unsettled, that when the air conditioner kicks on, I feel as if someone has attached an electrical cable to my back, sent a charge to the base of my spine.

  I’M IN MY OFFICE the following Tuesday when my cousin T. J. calls. He informs me that the family is auctioning Kenneth’s estate, that a number of our relatives are meeting at the ranch to prepare his things.

  “You know Uncle Ken,” he says, as the conversation’s about to conclude. “Wasn’t much on housekeeping.” He clears his throat and gives a nervous laugh. “I bet it’ll take us most the weekend.” T. J. drives a semi, works as assistant pastor for a Fundamentalist church in the town adjacent. There are insinuations in his remark that I far from appreciate, the Puritan implication that physical untidiness has its spiritual counterpart. But I let it pass, tell him I’ll be out at seven thirty to help. He thanks me and asks how Mother is doing. I skirt the question, let him know about receiving the truck.

  I write my column in fits, typing a few words as they come. I keep thinking of the playing cards, the apparent fact that my uncle relieved the loneliness of his existence with pornography. This is something I have little problem with, but as the hours pass, an anxiety begins to grow in the back of my thoughts: if Kenneth, I hypothesize, kept such items in his glove box, there’s no telling what we’ll find in his closets. My family will finally be able to level specific charges, and his liberalism will be seen as indicative of even more sinister transgressions. I can’t, I decide, allow this to happen, feeling that a strange bond has grown between us, that it’s my responsibility to defend him, conceal anything that might cause embarrassment. Of course, I realize it doesn’t matter in the least, that he’s finally beyond their reaches. Still, his is a memory I’m compelled to protect.

  So my plan is to drive out to Kenneth’s Friday evening before any of my relatives get there and sift his belongings, dispose of anything they might deem incriminating. Surely, even the most enthusiastic collector can’t have accumulated more pornography than I can manage in a few hours of intensive cleanup.

  That evening I drive over to visit Mother, this time in my Volkswagen. I find her tending the garden. She seems glad to see me, as if she too wants to dismiss our spat. We make lemonade, and then I sit on the porch and talk with her as she waters. We discuss events from her childhood, her brother’s windfall in the stock market, something humorous her father once told her, and for a few moments we’re actually having a relaxed and enjoyable time. I even become excited, thinking our relationship has broken some insuperable blockade. Slapping a mosquito into my thigh, I begin to laugh.

  But after a while, this starts having an opposite effect, and despite myself, I start growing angry, feeling more strongly than ever that Mother’s religion has kept us apart. There’s only so far any conversation can take us, and even though she’s chuckling now, I know some offhand phrase could be used as invitation for attack, a plea that I start attending church or to my soul.

  Picking up my glass, I walk back into the house and stand for a while at the kitchen sink. I look down the hall where the pictures begin, thinking that things might have been different if Father hadn’t died. For the first time in years, I find myself missing him, the sound of his voice. I can remember all of us together, how Mother seemed then, nuzzling herself beneath his arm on the way home from movies, sitting in a folding chair, overseeing his work on a car.

  Looking up, I see her dragging the hose across the lawn. I watch as she pulls it to a flowerbed, twists the nozzle and, when nothing comes, realizes there’s a kink cutting off the pressure. She raises the hose and snaps it, trying to whip out the knot, reminding me of I don’t know what with the sleeves of her housecoat flailing and a pained expression on her face. Finally, she lays the nozzle in the grass and disappears beyond view of the sliding glass doors. I continue watching it, that small piece of brass a few yards from the concrete, buried, almost, in green. Suddenly, it moves several inches on the end of its hose—then a foot. Water begins to fan from its spout, spraying partly into the ground, partly in an arc against the side of the house. I’m about to walk over and turn it off when Mother moves back into the frame, stooping to retrieve the hose, smiling.

  THE SUN IS GOING under by the time I get off work. Kenneth’s ranch is six miles to the north of town, a half mile east. There’s a blacktop off 99 that turns to red dirt and gravel, ditches with sumac shrubs, berries coated in dust. The oaks out here are thick and with the windows down I can hear katydids above the sound of my engine. Dusk is settling among the trees and bushes, blurring out the edges of the leaves. At the bottom of a small valley is the driveway to my uncle’s house. I pull in to find the gate closed, padlocked. Stepping out of the car,
I climb the fence and start up the clamshell drive, the moon just now coming over the tree line.

  Walking around a bend in the road, I see Kenneth’s house, back in a clearing among the trees. The yard is unkempt, dandelions and milkweed, but I can tell from an outside lamp that the power’s still on. I’m reassured by this, glad I don’t have to move about the house with the flashlight I’ve brought. I’ve never been overly fearful of such things, but there is something about the house I find unearthly, edged as it is by tangled limbs, the noise of crickets. Reminding myself I’ve seen too many horror films, I step onto the porch and move up to the door. Before I can catch myself, I’ve already knocked.

  There are several keys on the ring and one of them slides easily into the deadbolt. I push the door and it moves soundlessly on its hinges. Inside, I quickly find a lamp, then a switch that throws on another. In the yellow light fanning from their shades, I see that I’m standing in the living room of a common farmhouse: rustic paintings and rocking chairs, a set of mahogany bookcases filled with classic novels and plays. I walk over and run a finger along their spines, hoping to be able to persuade my relatives that they should go to me. On the third shelf is a book I remember enjoying as a child, a mystery of sorts by V. Thomas Maas. It too is filled with old houses and secrets, creaky staircases, the intimation of ghosts. Flipping the pages, I find a passage I vaguely remember, a scene where the protagonist searches his grandmother’s library for the book he believes will contain an important letter. I read it slowly, a smile widening my face as the character pulls volume after volume from the shelf, unable to discover the object of his quest. Wishing there was someone to share this, I put the book back in its place, turning behind me to glance around the room.

  As badly as I hate to admit it, T. J. was right about the housekeeping. The house is remarkably untidy, a layer of dust over everything, a smell of inactivity which I try not to associate with death. There are cardboard boxes half filled with magazines—National Geographic and Harper’s, The Nation and Time—cases of what look to be batteries and art supplies, sacks of kitty litter, cat food, and treats. I begin to wonder who took care of Kenneth’s cats, and I’m suddenly worried I might run across a carcass, afraid they may have been locked inside. I look over and see a small door with a plastic flap cut into one wall, decide that they’ve long since deserted.

  I sit down in one of the rockers, attempt to develop some type of a plan. Finally, I can’t see any other way except to examine every cranny and hiding place. I start with the hallway closets, fairly empty except for a few shotguns, an expensive-looking rod and reel. I move on to the bedrooms, the dresser drawers, between the mattresses, under the beds. In what I take to have been Kenneth’s room, there’s a small nightstand in which I discover pairs of tube socks and an envelope filled with black-and-white snapshots. Flipping quickly through them, I see they’re only family photos, many duplicates of the pictures Mother has on her walls. I pocket these, deciding she might, at some point, want to see them.

  I go in the kitchen, search the cabinets and beneath the table, even climb a ladder into the attic, seeing nothing but pink insulation, two-by-four trestles, and pinewood joists. Out back of the house, in Kenneth’s work shed, I find welding equipment and odd-looking tools, an ancient saddle with intricate stitching. Coming inside, wiping sweat from my neck, I make a last sweep through the house: couch cushions and medicine cabinet, under the furniture and sinks. I look at my watch and see that I’ve been at it for an hour and a half, having turned up nothing remotely indecent. Sitting once again in Kenneth’s rocker, I begin to feel rather guilty. There’s no way to know precisely where the playing cards came from, how they found their way into the glove box, whether or not my uncle even knew of their existence. Turning off the lights and locking the deadbolt behind me, I walk back down the drive, coming to the gate in the full glare of the moon.

  On the way home and then later at the house, I consider my hypocrisy, how I too had judged Kenneth. I wonder how much there is about me that’s in need of exorcism, to what extent I’ve been contaminated by my family’s ethics. I pour myself a drink and ease into the recliner, begin to think, once again, about finding my way out of this town, applying, perhaps, for an editor’s position back east.

  I pull the envelope from my pocket and shuffle through the pictures, studying the faces of these people, these lives that have somehow infected mine. Here’s my grandfather, the righteous patriarch, a man who would use racial slurs at the slightest provocation. Here’s Uncle William, police officer for fiftyone years, an activist against unionization throughout the Midwest. Here’s my cousin from Arkansas, the one relative my family thinks of as having made it. She’s currently head lackey for a Republican senator, the man pushing for machine-gun nests along the Texas border.

  I flip through a few more photos, take a few more sips, so depressed I feel my breathing become labored. I’m about to put them inside their envelope when I come across a picture I’ve seen countless times. It’s the one of Aunt Janet and the lake, she in her bathing suit, glancing to her left. But what I haven’t seen before is my mother sitting beside her, likewise in swimsuit, her child’s head thrown backward and her throat exposed. Apparently, this is how the photograph looked before my mother had it cropped. My mother who’s never been to this lake, my mother who believes those lying are in danger of hellfire. I can’t accept it is really her. Clearly it is—her features, her teeth, her hair smooth and wet—though I have a difficult time recognizing her appearance—hers or my aunt’s, either one. It has little to do with context, the oddness of seeing this picture smaller, held in a hand, very little to do with studying the portrait as it was meant to be seen, two children arm in arm, enjoying the weather, the promise of youth. What makes them difficult to distinguish is their eyes or, more precisely, their lack of eyes—these thin-shouldered farm girls, expressions frozen in a laugh—the fact that across the eyes of Janet and my mother, someone has drawn a heavy, dark line, scribbled athwart their temples a blindfold of permanent black.

  LARGE OAKS AND CEDARS stand on either side of the road. The morning sun filters through them, their limbs casting wild-patterned shadows along the pavement. From time to time I look away from the blacktop and over at Mother sitting beside me, thumbing the pages of her Sunday school lesson, pages of her Bible. Light and shadow strobe her face and her complexion seems to alter between the two, between leaf shade and sunlight. I attempt for several moments to secure it in my mind the way she actually looks. I’ve studied her all my life and should be able to conjure something, but the shadows are coming so swiftly that as soon as an image appears, the darkness blurs it. I try slowing the car, speeding up, but the effect is much the same: mother’s face flickering and odd.

  We emerge from the trees, make it on to the highway, and in several minutes are pulling into the church’s gravel parking lot. FIRST PENTECOSTAL, the sign says. VISITORS WELCOME. I find a place close to the front and we enter the sanctuary, sit at the back watching people file in. Mother waves to each, beaming, this morning, to have her prodigal son beside her. Some walk over to greet us, but others simply go to their seats, the same ones, I assume, as the week before. When the room fills and the hands of the clock move to nine thirty-five, the man who performed Kenneth’s funeral approaches the pulpit.

  In several minutes we are singing. I don’t know the words, so my eyes shift between the hymnal and the backs of people’s heads, the minister above us belting out the song. By the time we reach the second verse, I’ve given over the pretense altogether, having become a mere spectator. I hear Mother’s voice beside me, so foreign-sounding that I glance at her mouth, possession describing this much better than I’d thought. When she catches me looking, she turns toward me slightly, grins.

  It was the day before yesterday I found the pictures, and still I haven’t spoken of them. Finally, what is there to say? Ask my mother what happened to her at the lake, why her sister committed suicide, the reason she avoided Kenneth al
l those years? Or perhaps I should suggest she go into counseling, tell her religion is, as Marx said, an opiate to prevent her from facing reality. Finding my place in the songbook, I shake my head at such thoughts and mouth a few words, begin searching to find the chorus.

  When it’s turned over in my head, I know very little, just segments of a story that barely connect. I can conjecture all I want about Kenneth’s motives for giving me his truck, surmise that he did so as confession or payment, a last effort at retribution. Or I could decide it was all intended, that my family’s notion of a cartoon devil is not so wide of the mark. But whatever my hypothesis, the pieces of this narrative don’t exactly fit, and finally, I’m not sure if I want them to, if I could handle it if they did. After all, as a means of coping, understanding is greatly overrated. There has to be, I think, a better way of dealing with such things, a better way of growing numb. It’s hard not to look around me and see that these people have found theirs. Heading toward the final verse, I hear my mother’s strong, clear voice, and I know what’s just beneath those syllables, know also that they cause her to feel it less. That, I suppose, is something of an accomplishment: finding a cure you can live with, one that doesn’t gnaw away at your soul.

  After all, there’s pain of my own I’d like to assuage. After Father died, I thought education would expand my consciousness, give me a means of comprehending my grief. But, in many respects, it only clouded my awareness all the more. I’ll never know the simple abandon I see in my mother, her head tilted and her hands raised, a look on her face as of total assurance. No doubt these people are deluded, their worship little more than a drug. But were it possible, if I could allow my mind to stop churning, it’s one I’d consume without hesitation—open my arm to the needle, widen my mouth for the eye-dropper or pill. There are even times when I’m convinced I could accept the brainwashing gladly. Provided, of course, it would stand between my eyes and the blindfold, the descending strip of black that, as the years progress, threatens to turn my vision to darkness.