Barking Man: And Other Stories (Open Road)

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Jackson took off his knee pads, which he hadn’t been able to get rid of while he was running. He took off his shoes and some more of his clothes and waded out into the lake. The dogs ran up and down the shoreline barking like crazy, and now and then one of them would put a paw in the water, but they were not dogs that liked to swim. Without thinking, Jackson swam straight out to where Bantry was at and laid a hold to him, only Bantry got a better hold on him first, and dragged him right on under. It was not anything he meant to be doing, exactly, just how any drowning man behaves. He was trying to climb out of the lake over Jackson’s back, but Jackson was going down underneath him, getting lightheaded, for no matter what he tried he couldn’t raise his head clear for a breath. Then it came to him he had better swim for the bottom. When he dove down he felt Bantry come loose from him and he kept going down till he was free, then out a ways, swimming as far as he could under water before he came back up.

  He was tired then, and his banged ribs had started to hurt from that long time he’d been down and holding his breath. For a minute or two he had to lie in a dead-man’s float to rest, and then he raised his head and started treading water, slow. It was a cloudy day, no sun at all, and he could feel the cold cutting through to his bones. The surface of the lake was black as oil. Bantry was still struggling about twenty feet from him, but he was near done in by that time. He stared at Jackson, his eyes rolling white. Jackson trod water and looked right back at him until Bantry gave it up and slid down under the lake.

  Ripples were widening out from the place where Bantry’s head went down, and Peter Jackson kept on treading water. He counted up to twenty-five before he dove. It was ten feet deep, maybe twelve, at the point where they were at, colder yet along the bottom and dark with silt. He didn’t find Bantry the first dive he made, though he stayed down until his head was pounding. It took him a count of thirty to get the breath back for another try, and he was starting to think he might have miscalculated. But on the second time he found him and hauled him back up. Bantry was not putting up any fight now; he was not any more than a dead weight. Jackson got him in a cross-chest carry and swam him into the shore.

  The dogs were going wild there on the bank, yapping and jumping up and down. Jackson dumped Bantry face down on the gravel and swatted the dogs away. He knelt down and started mashing Bantry’s shoulders. There was plenty of water coming out of him, but he was cold and not moving a twitch, and Jackson was thinking he had miscalculated sure enough when Bantry shuddered and coughed and puked a little and then raised up on his elbows. Jackson got off of him and watched him start to breathe. After a little bit, Bantry’s eyes came clear.

  “You’da let me drown,” Bantry said. “You’da just let me …”

  “You never left me much of a choice,” Jackson said.

  “You was just setting there watching me drown,” Bantry said. He sat up one joint at a time and then let his head drop down and hang over his folded knees. The cut above his eye had opened back up and was bleeding some. In a minute, he started to cry.

  Peter Jackson never had seen anybody carrying on the way Bantry was, not some pretty near grown man, at least. He didn’t feel any too sorry for Bantry, but it was unpleasant watching him cry like that. It was like watching a baby cry when it can’t tell you what’s the matter, and there ain’t no way for you to tell it to quit. He thought of one thing or another he might say. That he’d had to take a gambler’s chance. That a poor risk was better than no hope at all. But he was worn out from swimming and struggling, too tired to feel like talking much. Bantry kept on crying, not letting up, and Peter Jackson got himself on his feet and went limping up to the house with the dogs.

  That was what did it for Bantry, though, or so it seemed. Anyway, he was a lot different after that. He acted nicer with the dogs, feeding them treats, stroking them and loving them up, when he never as much as touched one before, if he had a way around it. He began to volunteer to do extra things, helping more around the house and garden, when his chores in the kennel were done. He put on pads and learned to help Jackson train dogs for K-9. He followed Jackson around trying to strike up conversation, like, for a change, he was hungry for company. He was especially nice with Bronwen and Caesar, and Caesar seemed to take a shine to him right back. Bantry had turned the corner, what it looked like. In about two more weeks, Peter Jackson called the courthouse and said they could send somebody out to pick him up.

  As it turned out, it was me they sent. I was still a part-time deputy then, and the call came on a Saturday when I was on duty. Bantry was packed and all ready to go when I got there. Soon as I had parked the car he came walking over, carrying his grip. Caesar was walking alongside of him, and every couple of steps they took, Bantry would reach down and give him a pat on the head.

  “Hello, Mr. Trimble,” he said. He put out his hand and we shook.

  “You look bright-eyed arid bushy-tailed,” I said. “I’d scarce have known you, Bantry.”

  “You can call me Don,” he said, and smiled.

  I told him to go on and get in the front while I went down to take a message to Jackson. It surprised me just a touch he hadn’t already come out himself. He was sitting on his back stoop when I found him, staring out across the lake. Bronwen was sitting there next to him. Every so often she’d slap her paw up on his knee, like she was begging him for something. Jackson didn’t appear to be paying her much mind.

  “Well sir, you’re a miracle worker,” I said. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I’d just been told, but it looks like you done it again.”

  “Hello, Trimble,” Jackson said, flicking his eyes over me and then back away. He’d known I was there right along, just hadn’t shown it. Bronwen slapped her paw back up on his knee.

  “Marvin said tell you he’ll have another one ready to send out here shortly,” I said. Jackson looked off across the lake.

  “I ain’t going to have no more of ’m,” he said.

  “Why not?” I said. Bronwen pawed at him another time, and Jackson reached over and started rubbing her ears.

  “Well, I figured something out,” Jackson said, still staring down there at the water. “It ain’t any different than breaking an animal, what I been doing to them boys.”

  I stepped up beside him and looked where he was looking, curious to see what might be so interesting down there on the lake. There wasn’t so much as a fish jumping. Nothing there but that blue, blue water, cold looking and still like it was ice.

  “What if you’re right?” I said. “More’n likely it’s the very thing they need.”

  “Yes, but a man is not an animal,” he said. He waited a minute, and clicked his tongue. “Anyhow, I’m getting too old,” he said.

  “You?” I said. “Ain’t nobody would call you old.” It was a true fact I never had thought of him that way myself, though he might have been near seventy by that time. He’d been a right smart older than his wife.

  Jackson raised up his left hand and shook it under my nose. I could see how his fingers were getting skinny the way an old man’s will, and how loose his wedding band was rattling. Then he laid his hand back down on Bronwen’s head.

  “I’m old,” he said. “I can feel it now sure enough. The days run right by me and I can’t get a hold on them. And you want to know what?”

  “What?” I said. Walked right into it like the sharp edge of a door.

  “It’s a relief,” Peter Jackson told me. “That’s what.”

  CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY

  I DON’T KNOW HOW much I remember about that place anymore. It was nothing but somewhere I came to put in some pretty bad time, though that was not what I had planned on when I went there. I had it in mind to improve things, but I don’t think you could fairly claim that’s what I did. So that’s one reason I might just as soon forget about it. And I didn’t stay there all that long, not more than nine months or so, about the same time, come to think, that the child I’d come to try and get back had lived inside my body.

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nbsp; It was a cluster-housing thing called Spring Valley, I wouldn’t know why, just over the Botetourt County line on the highway going north out of Roanoke. I suppose it must have been there ten or fifteen years, long enough to lose that raw look they have when they’re new built, but not too rundown yet, so long as you didn’t look close. There were five or six long two-story buildings running in rows back up the hillside. You got to the upstairs apartments by an outside balcony, like you would in a motel. The one I rented was in the lowest building down the hill, upstairs on the northwest corner. There was a patch of grass out front beyond the gravel of the parking lot, but the manager didn’t take much trouble over it. He kept it cut, but it was weedy, and a few yards past the buildings it began to go to brush. By my corner there was a young apple tree that never made anything but small sour green apples, knotted up like little fists. Apart from that there was nothing nearby that the eye would care to dwell on. But upstairs, out my front windows, I could look way out beyond the interstate to where the mountains were.

  You got there driving about two miles up a bumpy two-lane from the state road. It was mostly wooded land along the way, with a couple of pastures spotted in, and one little store. About halfway you crossed the railroad cut, and from the apartment I could hear the trains pulling north out of town, though it wasn’t near enough I could see them. I listened to them often enough, though, nights I couldn’t sleep, and bad times I might pull a chair out on the concrete slab of balcony so I could hear them better.

  The apartment was nothing more than the least I needed, some place that would look all right and yet cost little enough to leave me something to give the lawyer. Two rooms and a bath and a fair-sized kitchen. It would have been better if there’d been one more room for Davey but I couldn’t stretch my money far enough to cover that. It did have fresh paint on the walls and the trim in the kitchen and bathroom was in good enough shape. And it was real quiet mostly, except that the man next door would beat up his wife about two or three times a week. The place was close enough to soundproof I couldn’t usually hear talk but I could hear yelling plain as day, and when he got going good he would slam her bang into our common wall. If she hit in just the right spot it would send all my pots and pans flying off the pegboard where I’d hung them there above the stove.

  Not that it mattered to me that the pots fell down, except for the noise and the time it took to pick them up again. Living alone like I was I didn’t have heart to do much cooking, and if I did fix myself something I mostly used a plain old iron skillet that hung there on the same wall. The rest was a set of Revereware my family give me when Patrick and I got married. They had copper bottoms, and when I first moved in that apartment I polished them to where it practically hurt to look at them head on, but it was all for show.

  The whole apartment was done about the same way, made into something I kept spotless and didn’t much care to use. A piece of dirt never got a fair chance to settle there, that much was for sure. I wore down the kitchen counters scrubbing out the old stains, I went at the grout between the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, I did all that kind of thing. Spring Valley was the kind of place where people would sometimes leave too fast to take their furniture along, so I was able to get most everything I needed from the manager, who saved it up to try selling it to whatever new people moved in. Then I bought fabric and sewed covers to where everything matched, and I sewed curtains and got posters to put up on the walls, but I can’t say I ever felt at home there. It was an act, and I wasn’t putting it on for me or Davey, but for those other people who would come to see it and judge it. And however good I could get it looking, it never felt quite right.

  I’d step into the place with the same cross feeling I had when I got in my car, an old Malibu I’d bought a body and paint job for, instead of the new clutch and brakes it really needed. But one way or another I could run the thing, and six days a week I would climb in it and go back down to the state road, turn north and drive up to the interstate crossing. There was a Truckstops of America up there, and that was where my job was at. I worked the three snake bends of the counter and it was enough to keep me run off my feet most days. Or nights, since I was on a swing shift that rolled over every ten days. I wouldn’t have ate the food myself but the place was usually busy and the tips were fair. I’d have made a lot more money working in a bar somewhere, being a cocktail waitress or what have you, but that would have been another case of it not looking the way it was supposed to.

  The supervisor out there was a man named Tim that used to know Patrick a little, back from before we split. He was how I got the job, and he was good about letting me have time off when I needed it for the lawyer or something, and he let me take my calls there too. By and large he was an easy enough man to work for except that about once a week he would have a tantrum over something or other and try to scream the walls down for a while. Still, it never went anywhere beyond yelling, and he always acted sorry once he got through.

  The other waitress on my shift was about old enough to be my mother, I would guess. Her name was Priscilla but she wanted you to call her Prissy, though it didn’t suit her a bit. She was kind of dumpy and she had to wear support hose and she had the worst dye job on her hair I just about ever saw, some kind of home brew that turned her hair the color of French’s mustard. But she was good-natured, really a kindly person, and we got along good and helped each other out whenever one of us looked like getting behind.

  Well, I was tired all the time with the shifts changing the way they did. The six-to-two I hated the worst because it would have me getting back to my apartment building around three in the morning, which was not the time the place looked its best. It was a pretty sorry lot of people living there, I hadn’t quite realized when I moved in, a lot of small-time criminals, dope dealers and thieves, and none of them too good at whatever crime they did. So when I came in off that graveyard shift there was a fair chance I’d find the sheriff’s car out there looking for somebody. I suppose they felt like if they came at that time of night they would stand a better chance of catching whoever they were after asleep.

  I didn’t get to know the neighbors any too well, it didn’t seem like a good idea. The man downstairs was a drunk and a check forger. Sometimes he would break into the other apartments looking for whiskey, but he never managed to get into mine. I didn’t keep whiskey anyhow, maybe he had some sense for that. The manager liked to make passes at whatever women were home in the day. He even got around to trying me, though not but the one time.

  The man next door, the one that beat up his wife, didn’t do crimes or work either that I ever could tell. He just seemed to lay around the place, maybe drawing some kind of welfare. There wasn’t a whole lot to him, he was just a stringy little fellow, hair and mustache a dishwater brown, cheap green tattoos running up his arms. Maybe he was stronger than he looked, but I did wonder how come his wife would take it from him, since she was about a head taller and must have outweighed him an easy ten pounds. I might have thought she was whipping on him—stranger things have been known to go on—but she was the one that seemed like she might break out crying if you looked at her crooked. She was a big fine-looking girl with a lovely shape, and long brown hair real smooth and straight and shiny. I guess she was too hammered down most of the time to pay much attention to the way she dressed, but she still had pretty brown eyes, big and long-lashed and soft, kind of like a cow’s eyes are, except I never saw a cow that looked that miserable.

  At first I thought maybe I might make a friend of her, she was about the only one around there I felt like I might want to. Our paths crossed pretty frequent, either around the apartment buildings or in the Quik-Sak back toward town, where I’d find her running the register some days. But she was shy of me—shy of anybody, I suppose. She would flinch if you did so much as say hello. So after a while, I quit trying. She’d get hers about twice a week, maybe other times I wasn’t around to hear it happen. It’s a wonder all the things you can learn to ignore, an
d after a month or so I was so accustomed I barely noticed when they would start in. I would just wait till I thought they were good and through, and then get up and hang those pans back on the wall where they were supposed to go.

  What with the way the shifts kept rolling over out there at the TOA, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I never did learn to sleep in the daytime worth a damn. I would just lie down when I got back till some of the ache drained out of me, and then get up and try to think of some way to pass the time. There wasn’t a whole lot to do around that apartment. I didn’t have any TV, only a radio, and that didn’t work too well itself. After the first few weeks I sent off to one of those places that say they’ll pay you to stuff envelopes at your own house. My thought was it would be some extra money, but it never amounted to anything much of that. It just killed me some time and gave me something to do with my hands, in between smoking cigarettes. Something to do with myself while I was worrying, and I used to worry a good deal in those days.

  The place where Davey had been fostered out was not all that far away, just about ten or twelve miles on up the road, out there in the farm country. The people were named Baker, I never got to first names with them, just called them Mr. and Mrs. They were some older than me, just into their forties, and they didn’t have children of their own. The place was just a small farm but Mr. Baker grew tobacco on the most of it and I’m told he made it a paying thing. Mrs. Baker kept a milk cow or two and she grew a garden and canned. Thrifty people, in the old-time way. They were real sweet to Davey and he seemed to like being with them pretty well. It was a place a little boy would expect to enjoy, except there weren’t any neighbors too near. And he had been staying there almost the whole two years, which was lucky too, since most children usually got moved around a whole lot more than that.

  But that was the trouble, like the lawyer explained to me, it was just too good. Davey was doing too well out there. He’d made out better in the first grade too than anybody would have thought. So nobody really felt like he needed to be moved. The worst of it was the Bakers had got to like him well enough they were saying they wanted to adopt him if they could, and that was what plagued my mind the most. If I thought about that while I was doing those envelopes, it would start me giving myself paper cuts.