The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  They have two kids, my nephews. Harold was in love with a married woman years ago, Louise, her name was, and Louise had a son I always thought Harold had fathered, but that’s another story, and I think he’s over that by now. He got over that when he met Agatha.

  But this was about the dog, Bradley. I had taken Bradley out of the Humane Society and arranged to sneak him up to Five Oaks and to board him with Agatha and Harold, until I had accustomed Kathryn to dog householding, to living with a dog. My sister and Harold have a big house up there in Five Oaks, with plenty of room for a mutt. Their colonial is close to a WaldChem plant, and the house has five bedrooms and didn’t cost them too much, because of the chemical fumes or the poisoned groundwater or something, or simply because they’re located in central Michigan. It’s a huge house. Anyway, I thought it would take about a month for me to talk my then-wife Kathryn into tolerating a canine companion. I thought we needed a dog, required one. I thought our marriage required a dog. Young married people crave dogs. It cements them together. It gives them baby practice.

  But I didn’t have to talk Kathryn into our having a dog because she picked up a chair and threw it at me and left me for Jenny. When she threw that chair, she missed me, by the way. She could’ve broken my head open. Besides, what was so bad about what I said? Was she a lesbian? Or was it me? As a man? I wanted her to clarify my thinking. I was just trying to get her transformation lucid in my mind. She says I cursed at her but that is not the case. I may have raised my voice, but I did not curse. Anyway, after that climactic moment, I was alone by myself in the apartment, and I wanted that dog, Bradley, back. I shouldn’t say this, but I felt grief. And I needed that dog. I had nothing to hold on to except that dog, that dog with my name on it, my secret sharer, you might say.

  So on a bright Saturday morning in early winter I called my sister, Agatha. I told her I was going to drive up to her house in Five Oaks and get Bradley the dog and take him back home. Thanks for keeping him all this time, I said. I thought I should warn her I was coming, to ensure that she’d be around when I appeared on her doorstep.

  “Uh,” she said, “I don’t know about that.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “You can’t have Bradley back, is what I mean.” There was a long pause, and I could hear domestic noise in the background.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry, Bradley. But I can’t do it. You can’t have the dog back. We’re keeping him.”

  “Agatha, Bradley is my dog.”

  “Well, not really. Not anymore. He’s bonded with us.”

  “Bonded with you? Wait wait wait wait wait,” I said. “We had a deal, Agatha. We agreed. The deal was, you were going to board Bradley for a month or two, you know, enjoy his company, like you would a foreign exchange student, and I would pay you for expenses if need be, and then you were going to give him back.”

  “I know, but that was then. This must sound like a surprise,” Agatha said. “But, as I say, we’re not going to return him. We’re not going to because we can’t. I’m really sorry, Bradley, but we’re in love with him. The love is total and goes both ways. The foreign exchange student stays.”

  “Agatha, don’t talk to me about love. Kathryn has left me, I’m alone here, I’m very upset, what with my marriage suddenly over, and I need a dog. That dog, that specific dog, and no other. Bradley.”

  “Oh, sweetie, believe me, I understand. My heart goes out to you,” she said. “You know that. I think what Kathryn did to you was just unforgivable. And cruel. She was selfish. She was always selfish. Forgive me, but she was a real bitch, that woman, leaving you without so much as an apology. I’ll never speak to her again. But Harold and I have talked about this, and we think that you should go back to the Humane Society and get another dog. I mean, something truly extraordinary has happened here with us and Bradley. I can’t describe it. Besides, you can fall —”

  “ — Don’t say that. Don’t say I can fall in love with another dog.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that at all,” she said, although, of course, she was. “I was going to say . . .” But my sister is not all that quick-witted and couldn’t think of a substitute for what she had planned to announce to me.

  “Agatha, you gave me your word.”

  “Well, I’m taking it back. It’s null and void.”

  “You can’t take your word back after giving it,” I said. “That’s dishonorable.”

  “No? Well, unless I miss my guess, I just did. And honor: well, that’s such a guy thing.”

  “Agatha, I want that dog. For God’s sake. This is not a joke. I’m talking about my stability here.” There was a long pause. Then I said, “Now that I think about it, I could never count on you.”

  “Bradley, really, I’m sorry, but as their mother, I have to think of the kids. They just love Bradley. He’s a great kid dog. They can pummel him and he doesn’t mind at all. He’s what they call a nanny dog. This dog contributes to family values.”

  “Oh no. Jeez, this is like always. Damn it, you always took things and never gave them back. You took my toys and wrecked them. You wrecked the wind-up parking garage and then later you took my car, I mean my real car, the green Pontiac, when I was in college, and you dented it and you never told me until I saw the dent. I should’ve remembered how you do that. But I thought: this time I can trust Agatha.”

  “Let’s not go over that dent business again. I am so tired of hearing about that famous dent. And about trusting me? I guess you were wrong. The dog is bigger than that.”

  “Agatha, is Harold there?”

  “Nope, he’s down at the barbershop. It’s Saturday morning. Busy time for haircutting.”

  I heard Bradley barking. I sensed that he knew I was on the line, that I wanted him back. “I’m going to call Harold.”

  So I hung up on her and called Harold’s barbershop.

  “Harold,” I said, “I want that dog back.”

  “Hey, bro,” he said in his friendly way. “Whassup? I’m kinda busy right now.”

  “It’s about my dog,” I said. “I just talked to Agatha. She’s being stubborn. She won’t give me Bradley back, she says.”

  “Oh, that. Well, I know, but, understand, she’s real insistent and everything, and she does have a point. She’s pretty hard to fight with when she has a point.”

  “She gave me her word.”

  “Yeah, well. Your sister does that,” he said with a sigh.

  “Harold, I’ve got to have that dog. Kathryn left me and I’m a wreck.”

  “You sound like a wreck, I agree with you about that. But listen, Bradley, the kids have gone all crazy about that animal, and I don’t think I can return him to you. It’s not all that easy, taking a pet away from children.” He waited. “You don’t have kids. You don’t know about how kids scream at you. I mean, they really scream at you. They know how. It’s like their job.”

  I heard a sound from someone who was presumably in the barber chair.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh,” Harold said, “that’s my customer. Guy named Saul. He says I should return the dog.”

  “He’s right. A deal is a deal.” I waited. “There’s honor at stake here.”

  “There is? Whose honor?”

  In the background, I could hear the customer named Saul saying, “Your honor, Harold.”

  “Listen,” Harold said, “it’s a busy morning and I have to go.”

  “Harold, you and Agatha promised —”

  “Good-bye, Bradley. I’m sorry. I truly am.”

  And he hung up on me.

  I HAD NEVER REPOSSESSED a dog before. But that was what I would have to do. First I had to go down to Jitters for several hours to supervise and manage the staffing and work on the books. Also, we were still training Chloé — she’d left Dr. Enchilada’s, as I said, to do bookkeeping for us at the main downtown Jitters. But by two in the afternoon I thought everything was under control in the place, the custom
ers jabbering away on their caffeine highs, spraying bagel crumbs in every direction, and so I changed clothes in the back room and hopped in my car and headed up toward Five Oaks. I had taken along Bradley’s old leash, some Milk Bones and kibble, a bowl for water, and some squeak toys, including a squeak cat I thought he’d like to chew on.

  The trouble was that I had lingered over a bit too much caffeine myself, with the result that my nerves were on fire, and I was pulled over and ticketed on I-75 just north of Bay City for driving eighty-five miles an hour. Mr. Toad is a fast driver, I’ll admit that right now. The patrolman was a squat, bullet-headed youth with a mean and forthright expression of contempt. When I pulled out my wallet from my sport coat, several nuggets of dog kibble cascaded out. The cop, seeing this, intensified his expression of scorn. His face looked as if it had been made of concrete.

  “Officer, everyone was driving that speed,” I said, sounding authoritative, like a war correspondent. “We all were. I don’t see why you singled me out.”

  “Sir?” he said. Even his voice sounded concretelike. “Let me ask you a question. Have you ever gone hunting? Up north?”

  “Hunting? Once or twice. But I don’t see what —”

  “ — Duck hunting?”

  “No. Maybe once.”

  “Well,” he said, “if you’ve gone duck hunting, and you were there in the marshes, let’s say in the early morning, you know, at first light? When you aimed your gun, would you shoot at the individual duck, or would you shoot at the whole flock? You’d aim at one of them, wouldn’t you? That’s what I did. I aimed at you. And it seems I landed you.”

  So he opened his book and wrote out the ticket. But I explained to him as he wrote that I had been in a hurry to get a dog, my dog, and I explained about my wife leaving me — the caffeine still had me in its grip — but he seemed quite unsympathetic, and unmoved, and certainly not about to eat the ticket on my behalf. He was a callow youth with a simple idea of lawbreaking and had suffered no setbacks in the wars of love. He wore no wedding ring, I noticed. He said to me, after I had finished my presentation, “Things will go very ill for you if you are caught speeding again soon.” Where do they find phrases like that? He was still trying to act the part.

  Also, to compound my difficulties, it had started to snow, and the snow reminded me of Kathryn and of how we had once stood in front of a window hand in hand after going to the Humane Society, and how she had betrayed me, and her betrayal got mixed up in my head with Agatha’s, with the result that the dog started to seem like the solution to just about every aspect of my life. How pathetically low the stakes had fallen. So after getting ticketed the first time, I forgot about how fast I was going, with the result that about thirty miles north of my previous encounter with the law, I was pulled over again, about half a mile south of an outlet mall, but this time by a different guy, a better guy, though not Highway Patrol fortunately, but a local cop this time. He was a cop with soul, a midwestern rural African-American cop I’m talking about now, married this time, who was more sympathetic to my story, and who, with a downcast expression, issued me a warning.

  APPROACHING FIVE OAKS, I took the Oak Street exit off the freeway and drove past Bruckner Buick and crept past the WaldChem plant where Agatha worked as an administrative assistant to the CEO, this guy Schwartzwalder. There was a smell in the air of slightly rancid cooking oil mixed with the odor emanating from the paper plant near the river, an odor of cardboard and vanilla, a numbing upsurge of profitmaking industrial aerosols. I turned off the car radio so no one would know I was coming. I drove into town on little cat feet.

  Unlike the cat, however, my car was slipping and sliding. My helplessness had lost its sense of comedy. It had become inane. I saw my reflection in the rearview mirror, and the expression on my face, of outraged innocent depraved desperation, frightened me. My car skidded and slipped onto a sidewalk. Fortunately, no one was walking there or I might have killed somebody. I threw the car into reverse and resumed my undertaking, my car yawing down the avenue.

  I arrived in due course on their block, Agatha and Harold’s. It’s actually a nice enough neighborhood, tree-shaded, large old houses, solidly middle-class, lawns spray-painted with herbicidal chemicals in the summer. This being late fall, they already had their Christmas decorations assembled and displayed outside, with an enormous plastic sleigh and eight plastic electrified reindeer desecrating the roof. The noses on these reindeer blinked sequentially, and below them the MERRY CHRISTMAS sign burned brightly even in the daytime. The sleigh was cluttered with tinfoil gift paraphernalia. I think Harold put this up in September, a foible of his. Despite what you might think, I am not a cruel man, and I realized insightfully that I could not knock on the door and take Bradley the dog by stealth or force during the Christmas season. In front of the children, Tom and Louie, the event would be traumatic, it would spoil their holiday memories forever — Christmas would from this day onward be the time of year when they had lost the family dog — and I would eternally be the monstrous ogre uncle.

  So I parked about two houses away and advanced toward the perimeter of the house, glancing in every direction. My footwear caused me to slip on the ice. I fell with a great snowy thump. I may have looked like a comic figure but my insides were churning with misery and gastroenteritis. Next time I fell, my coccyx would be smashed into pieces. I stood up and pretended that nothing had happened, wiping the tears out of my eyes, tears of pain and suffering and rage.

  My inner life lacks dignity. There’s nothing I can do about that.

  My hope was that the dog would be in the back yard, romping, alone by himself, available for capture.

  No such luck. There was not a sign of Bradley. I checked the windows and walked around the house twice, stumbling once over the Christmas wiring. The house, despite its Christmas decorations, had an air of solitary warm security and the light of settled domesticity. It glowed in a way to break your heart. So after I had walked around the house twice, my spirit sinking, I saw Tom, my nephew, looking out the kitchen window quizzically at me. His scrubbed, freckled face appeared to float above a pot of dusty African violets on the sill. When he saw me, he smiled and waved. His hands had smears of dried chocolate pudding on them. I pointed at the back door. He ran back to let me in.

  In the mudroom, he gave me a hug, God bless him.

  “Hi, Uncle Bradley,” he said. “What’re you doing here? Did they invite you?”

  “Is your mother around?” I asked. I heard the sound of the TV set in the living room.

  “Naw, she’s upstairs, taking a nap.” He pointed at the mudroom ceiling. “I’ve been watching Power Rangers. Wanna see it? Louie’s over at a friend’s house.”

  “Okay.” I breathed out. Things were going my way. “Where’s Bradley?”

  “He’s —” And just then the dog padded into the room, as if by thought command. When he saw me, he wuffed once, and leaped up and put his front paws on my shoulders and began licking me on the face. It was just demonstrably what I needed. Passionate dog kisses were better than none at all, and were in fact more sincere than quite a few of the human variety I had been getting lately. Dogs don’t kiss you in public just for the sake of appearances. “There he is,” Tom said, with a child’s delight in noting the obvious.

  I thought for a moment. I would have to explain a delicate matter to my nephew, whom I loved. And I decided that I would have to tell him the truth. I was on a rash mission, but I was probably not a despicable person, and I was not about to lie to a child, at least one who was my relative.

  “Tom,” I said, “I have to have Bradley back.” I explained how Kathryn and I had found him in the Humane Society, how she had left me sad and alone, how she and I were getting a divorce, how I was feeling so awful that I couldn’t sleep at night, and that Bradley had always been my dog, because I had found him in the Humane Society, and that he had been boarding up here at Five Oaks for a few weeks, but now, I really really really needed to have him back.
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br />   “But he’s our dog now!” Tom said tearfully, and I felt my chance slipping away.

  “You can get another dog,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “They have places,” I said, “right here in Five Oaks, Humane Society places where they have every kind of dog, especially sad homeless dogs. They’re in prison there. They cry all night. They want homes.”

  “But they’ll be expensive!” he said. “We caaaaan’t do that!”

  “Not that expensive.”

  “Oh, yes, I know they will be.”

  I took out my wallet and opened it. I showed him the money inside. “How expensive do you think another dog would be?” I took out a five-dollar bill. “Five dollars, you think?” I put it into his hand.

  He gave me a measuring look. “More than that.”

  I took out a ten-dollar bill. “Fifteen dollars?”

  “That says ten on it.”

  “But you already have a five. Five and ten is fifteen.”

  “Oh. No, more than that, I would just betcha.”

  I took out a twenty from my wallet and pressed it into his little child’s palm. “This much?” I asked. In the background I heard the Power Rangers killing something that sounded like a giant worm equipped with buzzers. “Think this is enough?” I wouldn’t do any more arithmetic to confuse him.

  “Maybe a little more.”

  I took out another five. “How about this?” He grabbed at it. “A five, and a ten, and a twenty, and another five. You could certainly buy a dog for that.”

  “Not as good a dog as Bradley,” he said.