Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  He was Buddy Landon, and he tried to sell her a hunting dog. He seemed perfectly serious. Did she want a coonhound or a bird dog? The thing wrong with bird dogs was that they liked to run so much they often strayed, he said. He recommended the Georgia redbone hound for intelligence and patience. “The redbone can jump and tree, but he doesn’t bark too much,” he said. “He don’t cry wolf on you, and he’s a good fighter.”

  “What do I need a coon dog for?” said Ruby, wishing he had a good answer.

  “You must be after a bird dog then,” he said. “Do you prefer hunting ducks or wild geese? I had some hounds that led me on a wild-goose chase one time after an old wildcat. That thing led us over half of Kentucky. That sucker never would climb a tree! He wore my dogs out.” He whooped and clapped his hands.

  There were eight empty dog crates in the back of his pickup, and he had chained the dogs to a line between two trees. Ruby approached them cautiously, and they all leaped into the air before their chains jerked them back.

  “That little beagle there’s the best in the field,” Buddy said to a man in a blue cap who had sidled up beside them.

  “What kind of voice has he got?” the man said.

  “It’s music to your ears!”

  “I don’t need a rabbit dog,” the man said. “I don’t even have any rabbits left in my fields. I need me a good coon dog.”

  “This black-and-tan’s ambitious,” said Buddy, patting a black spot on a dog’s head. The spot was like a little beanie. “His mama and daddy were both ambitious, and he’s ambitious. This dog won’t run trash.”

  “What’s trash?” Ruby asked.

  “Skunk. Possum,” Buddy explained.

  “I’ve only knowed two women in my life that I could get out coon hunting,” the man in the blue cap said.

  “This lady claims she wants a bird dog, but I think I can make a coon hunter out of her,” said Buddy, grinning at Ruby.

  The man walked away, hunched over a cigarette he was lighting, and Buddy Landon started to sing, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” He said to Ruby, “I could have been Elvis Presley. But thank God I wasn’t. Look what happened to him. Got fat and died.” He sang, “ ‘Crying all the time. You ain’t never caught a rabbit …’ I love dogs. But I tell you one thing. I’d never let a dog in the house. You know why? It would get too tame and forget its job. Don’t forget, a dog is a dog.”

  Buddy took Ruby by the elbow and steered her through the fairgrounds, guiding her past tables of old plastic toys and kitchen utensils. “Junk,” he said. He bought Ruby a Coke in a can, and then he bought some sweet corn from a farmer. “I’m going to have me some roastin’ ears tonight,” he said.

  “I hear your dogs calling for you,” said Ruby, listening to the distant bugle voices of the beagles.

  “They love me. Stick around and you’ll love me too.”

  “What makes you think you’re so cute?” said Ruby. “What makes you think I need a dog?”

  He answered her questions with a flirtatious grin. His belt had a large silver buckle, with a floppy-eared dog’s head engraved on it. His hands were thick and strong, with margins of dirt under his large, flat nails. Ruby liked his mustache and the way his chin and the bill of his cap seemed to yearn toward each other.

  “How much do you want for that speckled hound dog?” she asked him.

  —

  He brought the sweet corn and some steaks to her house that evening. By then, the shucks on the corn were wilting. Ruby grilled the steaks and boiled the ears of corn while Buddy unloaded the dogs from his pickup. He tied them to her clothesline and fed and watered them. The pickup truck in Ruby’s driveway seemed as startling as the sight of the “Action News” TV van would have been. She hoped her neighbors would notice. She could have a man there if she wanted to.

  After supper, Buddy gave the dogs the leftover bones and steak fat. Leaping and snapping, they snatched at the scraps, but Buddy snarled back at them and made them cringe. “You have to let them know who’s boss,” he called to Ruby, who was looking on admiringly from the back porch. It was like watching a group of people playing “May I?”

  Later, Buddy brought his sleeping roll in from the truck and settled in the living room, and Ruby did not resist when he came into her bedroom and said he couldn’t sleep. She thought her timing was appropriate; she had recently bought a double bed. They talked until late in the night, and he told her hunting stories, still pretending that she was interested in acquiring a hunting dog. She pretended she was too, and asked him dozens of questions. He said he traded things—anything he could make a nickel from: retreaded tires, cars, old milk cans and cream separators. He was fond of the dogs he raised and trained, but it did not hurt him to sell them. There were always more dogs.

  “Loving a dog is like trying to love the Mississippi River,” he said. “It’s constantly shifting and changing color and sound and course, but it’s just the same old river.”

  Suddenly he asked Ruby, “Didn’t you ever get married?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t it bother you?”

  “No. What of it?” She wondered if he thought she was a lesbian.

  He said, “You’re too pretty and nice. I can’t believe you never married.”

  “All the men around here are ignorant,” she said. “I never wanted to marry any of them. Were you ever married?”

  “Yeah. Once or twice is all. I didn’t take to it.”

  —

  Later, in the hospital, on Sodium Pentothal, Ruby realized that she had about a hundred pictures of Clint Eastwood, her favorite actor, and none of Buddy. His indistinct face wavered in her memory as she rolled down a corridor on a narrow bed. He didn’t have a picture of her either. In a drawer somewhere she had a handful of prints of her high school graduation picture, taken years ago. Ruby Jane MacPherson in a beehive and a Peter Pan collar. She should remember to give him one for his billfold someday. She felt cautious around Buddy, she realized, the way she did in high school, when it had seemed so important to keep so many things hidden from boys. “Don’t let your brother find your sanitary things,” she could hear her mother saying.

  In the recovery room, she slowly awoke at the end of a long dream, to blurred sounds and bright lights—gold and silver flashes moving past like fish—and a pain in her chest that she at first thought was a large bird with a hooked beak suckling her breast. The problem, she kept thinking, was that she was lying down, when in order to nurse the creature properly, she ought to sit up. The mound of bandages mystified her.

  “We didn’t have to take very much,” a nurse said. “The doctor didn’t have to go way up under your arm.”

  Someone was squeezing her hand. She heard her mother telling someone, “They think they got it all.”

  A strange fat woman with orange hair was holding her hand. “You’re just fine, sugar,” she said.

  —

  When Ruby began meeting Buddy at the fairgrounds on Third Mondays, he always seemed to have a new set of dogs. One morning he traded two pocket knives for a black-and-tan coonhound with limp ears and star-struck eyes. By afternoon, he had made a profit of ten dollars, and the dog had shifted owners again without even getting a meal from Buddy. After a few months, Ruby lost track of all the different dogs. In a way, she realized, their identities did flow together like a river. She thought often of Buddy’s remark about the Mississippi River. He was like the river. She didn’t even have an address for him, but he always showed up on Third Mondays and spent the night at her house. If he’d had a profitable day, he would take her to the Burger Chef or McDonald’s. He never did the usual things, such as carry out her trash or open the truck door for her. If she were a smoker, he probably wouldn’t light her cigarette.

  Ruby liked his distance. He didn’t act possessive. He called her up from Tennessee once to tell her he had bought a dog and named it Ruby. Then he sold the dog before he got back to town. When it was Ruby’s birthday, he made nothing of that, but on
another day at the fairgrounds he bought her a bracelet of Mexican silver from a wrinkled old black woman in a baseball cap who called everybody “darling.” Her name was Gladys. Ruby loved the way Buddy got along with Gladys, teasing her about being his girlfriend.

  “Me and Gladys go way back,” he said, embracing the old woman flamboyantly.

  “Don’t believe anything this old boy tells you,” said Gladys with a grin.

  “Don’t say I never gave you nothing,” Buddy said to Ruby as he paid for the bracelet. He didn’t fasten the bracelet on her wrist for her, just as he never opened the truck door for her.

  The bracelet cost only three dollars, and Ruby wondered if it was authentic. “What’s Mexican silver anyway?” she asked.

  “It’s good,” he said. “Gladys wouldn’t cheat me.”

  Later, Ruby kept thinking of the old woman. Her merchandise was set out on the tailgate of her station wagon—odds and ends of carnival glass, some costume jewelry, and six Barbie dolls. On the ground she had several crates of banties and guineas and pigeons. Their intermingled coos and chirps made Ruby wonder if Gladys slept in her station wagon listening to the music of her birds, the way Buddy slept in his truck with his dogs.

  The last time he’d come to town—the week before her operation—Ruby traveled with him to a place over in the Ozarks to buy some pit bull terriers. They drove several hours on interstates, and Buddy rambled on excitedly about the new dogs, as though there were something he could discover about the nature of dogs by owning a pit bull terrier. Ruby, who had traveled little, was intensely interested in the scenery, but she said, “If these are mountains, then I’m disappointed.”

  “You ought to see the Rockies,” said Buddy knowingly. “Talk about mountains.”

  At a little grocery store, they asked for directions, and Buddy swigged on a Dr Pepper. Ruby had a Coke and a bag of pork rinds. Buddy paced around nervously outside, then unexpectedly slammed his drink bottle in the tilted crate of empties with such force that several bottles fell out and broke. At that moment, Ruby knew she probably was irrevocably in love with him, but she was afraid it was only because she needed someone. She wanted to love him for better reasons. She knew about the knot in her breast and had already scheduled the mammogram, but she didn’t want to tell him. Her body made her angry, interfering that way, like a nosy neighbor.

  They drove up a winding mountain road that changed to gravel, then to dirt. A bearded man without a shirt emerged from a house trailer and showed them a dozen dogs pacing in makeshift kennel runs. Ruby talked to the dogs while Buddy and the man hunkered down together under a persimmon tree. The dogs were squat and broad-shouldered, with squinty eyes. They were the same kind of dog the Little Rascals had had in the movies. They hurled themselves against the shaky wire, and Ruby told them to hush. They looked at her with cocked heads. When Buddy finally crated up four dogs, the owner looked as though he would cry.

  At a motel that night—the first time Ruby had ever stayed in a motel with a man—she felt that the knot in her breast had a presence of its own. Her awareness of it made it seem like a little energy source, like the radium dial of a watch glowing in the dark. Lying close to Buddy, she had the crazy feeling that it would burn a hole through him.

  During The Tonight Show, she massaged his back with baby oil, rubbing it in thoroughly, as if she were polishing a piece of fine furniture.

  “Beat on me,” he said. “Just like you were tenderizing steak.”

  “Like this?” She pounded his hard muscles with the edge of her hand.

  “That feels wonderful.”

  “Why are you so tensed up?”

  “Just so I can get you to do this. Don’t stop.”

  Ruby pummeled his shoulder with her fist. Outside, a dog barked. “That man you bought the dogs from looked so funny,” she said. “I thought he was going to cry. He must have loved those dogs.”

  “He was just scared.”

  “How come?”

  “He didn’t want to get in trouble.” Buddy raised up on an elbow and looked at her. “He was afraid I was going to use those dogs in a dogfight, and he didn’t want to be traced.”

  “I thought they were hunting dogs.”

  “No. He trained them to fight.” He grasped her hand and guided it to a spot on his back. “Right there. Work that place out for me.” As Ruby rubbed in a hard circle with her knuckles, he said, “They’re good friendly dogs if they’re treated right.”

  Buddy punched off the TV button and smoked a cigarette in the dark, lying with one arm under her shoulders. “You know what I’d like?” he said suddenly. “I’d like to build me a log cabin somewhere—off in the mountains maybe. Just a place for me and some dogs.”

  “Just you? I’d come with you if you went to the Rocky Mountains.”

  “How good are you at survival techniques?” he said. “Can you fish? Can you chop wood? Could you live without a purse?”

  “I might could.” Ruby smiled to herself at the thought.

  “Women always have to have a lot of baggage along—placemats and teapots and stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Not as funny as you.” Ruby shifted her position. His hand under her was hurting her ribs.

  “I’ll tell you a story. Listen.” He sounded suddenly confessional. He sat up and flicked sparks at the ashtray. He said, “My daddy died last year, and this old lady he married was just out to get what he had. He heired her two thousand dollars, and my sister and me were to get the homeplace—the house, the barn, and thirty acres of bottomland. But before he was cold in the ground, she had stripped the place and sold every stick of furniture. Everything that was loose, she took.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “My sister sells Tupperware, and she was in somebody’s house, and she recognized the bedroom suit. She said, ‘Don’t I know that?’ and this person said, ‘Why, yes, I believe that was your daddy’s. I bought it at such-and-such auction.’ ”

  “What an awful thing to do to your daddy!” Ruby said.

  “He taught me everything I know about training dogs. I learned it from him and he picked it up from his daddy.” Buddy jabbed his cigarette in the ashtray. “He knew everything there was to know about field dogs.”

  “I bet you don’t have much to do with your stepmother now.”

  “She really showed her butt,” he said with a bitter laugh. “But really it’s my sister who’s hurt. She wanted all those keepsakes. There was a lot of Mama’s stuff. Listen, I see that kind of sorrow every day in my line of work—all those stupid, homeless dishes people trade. People buy all that stuff and decorate with it and think it means something.”

  “I don’t do that,” Ruby said.

  “I don’t keep anything. I don’t want anything to remind me of anything.”

  Ruby sat up and tried to see him in the dark, but he was a shadowy form, like the strange little mountains she had seen outside at twilight. The new dogs were noisy—bawling and groaning fitfully. Ruby said, “Hey, you’re not going to get them dogs to fight, are you?”

  “Nope. But I’m not responsible for what anybody else wants to do. I’m just the middleman.”

  Buddy turned on the light to find his cigarettes. With relief, Ruby saw how familiar he was—his tanned, chunky arms, and the mustache under his nose like the brush on her vacuum cleaner. He was tame and gentle, like his best dogs. “They make good watchdogs,” he said. “Listen at ’em!” He laughed like a man watching a funny movie.

  “They must see the moon,” Ruby said. She turned out the light and tiptoed across the scratchy carpet. Through a crack in the curtains she could see the dark humps of the hills against the pale sky, but it was cloudy and she could not see the moon.

  —

  Everything is round and full now, like the moon. Linda’s belly. Bowling balls. On TV, Steve Martin does a comedy routine, a parody of the song “I Believe.” He stands before a gigantic American flag and r
ecites his beliefs. He says he doesn’t believe a woman’s breasts should be referred to derogatorily as jugs, or boobs, or Winnebagos. “I believe they should be referred to as hooters,” he says solemnly. Winnebagos? Ruby wonders.

  After the operation, she does everything left-handed. She has learned to extend her right arm and raise it slightly. Next, the doctors have told her, she will gradually reach higher and higher—an idea that thrills her, as though there were something tangible above her to reach for. It surprises her, too, to learn what her left hand has been missing. She feels like a newly blind person discovering the subtleties of sound.