The Dark Dark

by Samantha Hunt

  The night is navy blue. Stars and cold. The grass underfoot breaks into a spicy smell, oregano and dirt. Why should anyone be afraid of night? But then there is motion around me like standing in a flooded river and I’m terrified. I am afraid of this night. I stumble back, trying to figure out what I’m looking at, to let the world come into focus. Fur and flanks and pointy hips and rib cages pass slowly before me. Sharp ears that nervously twitch forward and back. Everywhere the warmth of blood. Dark brown eyes lined with white fur and quivering backs that shake an itch. Silence. The road, the yard, the whole county is filled with deer, a calm stampede of them. An ocean of brown fur moving both together and separately, the way a caterpillar’s back will resist and accept the ground at the same time. Some deer going up the road, some going down. They thread one another. Not one of the deer says a word. It’s quiet. Each looks exactly the same, a flood of the ordinary. I am humiliated by their numbers, by the way they clump themselves together desperately like insects.

  I turn to go back inside our house, but he is standing on the front step. He stomps his foot. He doesn’t want us to go back in. He curls his spine and jumps, or not jumps but lurches quickly, urging me forward, as if that is where we both belong, as if that is where we’ve both always been. I know where forward is headed. I look out at the passing deer again, trying to pick out just one from the mass. This is hard to do. They are guarding what’s individual by disguising it with what’s not. See one leaf in a forest.

  My husband steps forward in front of me. He is staring at the deer, the way a person might stare at the sea—without thought, without time. I catch a scent. What do the deer mean? That is a good question. That is the best question. I think the answer is somewhere nearby. I can smell it. I think I could almost say what the answer is but I am a deer now and deer can’t talk.

  My husband steps forward again and I follow him right up to the edge of the deer. His antlers have eight points. I tell myself I’ll remember. I’ll find him or hope he will find me, or maybe being found won’t matter when we are animals. I step forward and then I step forward again, closer to the deer. I feel the warmth of that many living things. I feel their plainness rising up to swallow me. I step forward into the stream of beasts.

  THE YELLOW

  With his mother and father out of town for the weekend, Roy was left to forage for food in their nearly empty refrigerator. Was he physically or mentally unable to go grocery shopping? To order takeout from a restaurant? No, he wasn’t.

  Roy nibbled on a raw-onion-and-Cheddar sandwich. The rattling house unnerved him and the sandwich was too strong. It was an angry sandwich.

  What made a house rattle? He couldn’t say. He felt exposed in the kitchen. He abandoned his meal on the countertop and switched on the living room TV. He sat through the evening sitcoms, the late news, the late shows, and the start of a movie he’d not seen since 1985, telling himself that the noises he heard were wires scraping the siding in the wind. Even if they weren’t.

  At forty-two, he was living in his parents’ house again, eating their food, driving their car from job interview to job interview.

  “A pity,” his grandmother had labeled him at a cookout. They sat alone in weak folding chairs made weaker by the uneven ground. With no one else around to hear her declaration, she’d be able to deny it later. Or perhaps she thought he’d already gone inside. Macular degeneration. He’d walked away silently in case.

  Near two in the morning, sick from so much TV, his grandmother’s pronouncement in his head, Roy riled himself into a fury of self-improvement. He spent the early-morning hours in his bedroom tearing down homemade Bevis Frond posters and a paper chain he’d fashioned from gum wrappers. He moved all the furniture—except his bed and his dresser—up to the attic. In the basement, Roy found a half-full can of paint his father had used to mark the curb out front as a no-parking zone. Roy carefully began to paint his walls bright yellow.

  He went without sleep. What was sleep to him? And by eleven the next morning his work was done. He sat cross-legged on the floor inhaling heady fumes. Yellow was everywhere. Yellow and calm. Fear and confusion had left. Possibility and sunshine became his friends. In the yellow, he felt himself the newborn child of Patti Smith and Jacques Cousteau. Roy rolled a cigarette and visualized foreign, gentler lands: India, Morocco, Florida.

  Eventually, Sunday evening, his parents returned. His father, registering the new color of the walls, asked: “Son, did you turn faggot over the weekend?”

  Roy offered no comeback. He held on to the color. He picked a flake of tobacco from his tongue and admired his father’s use of the verb “turn.” Turn was precisely what Roy had done after three days of ripening in silence. He’d turned. He’d fermented into something wonderful and open, something porous and bright yellow.

  * * *

  Susanne’s turning, on the other hand, had been far more subtle. Perhaps she didn’t even realize she had turned, or maybe turning comes easier to women, acclimated as they are to miracles and pregnancies. Of which, by the age of thirty-nine, she’d had three.

  * * *

  Roy walked out on his father without answering. He grabbed the car keys from the kitchen table. He drove, and while he drove he tangled with the scan button on the car radio. “Don’t Do Me Like That.” “Don’t Bring Me Down.” “Love Is a Rose.” “Straight Tequila Night.” He liked all those songs, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to seek. There had to be something more—his itchy finger was sure. And there was. “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” The song made him forget that his much younger sister would be getting married next month. He drove, open, porous, and yellow, his tires floating above the asphalt. He drove, threading together seams and streets, all his ideas, until, quite suddenly, the night became rigid. In one moment, there was nothing—no music, no thoughts, just a pure electric shock of adrenaline. Something black and furry had darted out into the road, frozen in Roy’s headlights, and tumbled out of view. Squeals, brakes, and wrong-sounding mechanical thumpings followed. He had hit a dog. Roy had hit someone’s dog.

  Pulling off onto the soft shoulder, he felt a certain resistance from the undercarriage. The vehicle and the animal had been joined in a terrible union. He sat without moving. Perhaps it wasn’t a dog. Perhaps it was some other creature, a beast unnamed and unknown, part woman, part deer. The thought gave him pause. He sat. Not long but long enough to know the thing was truly dead. There’d be no watching it limp away into the dark night, no gnashing teeth. He would not have to back the car up and over the creature. He would not have to kill it a second time.

  Eventually Roy got out and the night stayed silent.

  He circled the vehicle two, three times. There was nothing to be seen. Overhead, black branches cut their silhouettes on the navy sky. Roy crouched and there it was. Just a dog. Simple. Its body had been wedged behind a back wheel. Roy grabbed its tail and yanked the broken thing out from under. Something tore like fabric. The neck was soft and floppy like a harshly used work shirt. The dog was dead for certain. Roy hoisted the animal into his arms and set out for the nearest driveway. He could see it up ahead. An outdoor floodlight spilled onto the road in a narrow swath, most of the light getting trapped in the yard by a line of tall maples. The dog’s body, not yet cold, warmed Roy and kept his arms from shaking.

  * * *

  Roy rang the bell, but Susanne was vacuuming. He carried the dog around to the side door. Front doors are for holidays. The dog’s brown eye caught the light. It was no holiday. As Roy waited on the stoop, Susanne, with a vacuum hose in hand—her exhausted life—came into view. His knocking grew more desperate. He couldn’t very well leave the carcass on her doorstep. He’d be forced to carry the dog from house to house until he found someone either heartbroken or intrepid enough to claim it.

  She started when she saw Roy. It wasn’t a busy street but the sort where too much wealth kept neighbors from dropping by unannounced.

  Earlier, Susanne’s husband had detected
a certain ticking in her. He’d packed their children into the car for a night of pizza and a double feature at the second-run movie theater, leaving her alone to explode, to splatter the house with a combination of things she’d ingested as a teenager—films and punk rock records that confirmed what she’d guessed back then: one dies alone.

  Best to have her family out of the way. Best to have them hidden in a dark cinema when the desire surged to chop her hair roughly and live on cigarettes. These bursts of freedom, while infrequent, were dangerous. Their self-indulgence could tear holes in evenings, marriages, families.

  She’d been lost in the roar of the vacuum—a device that had the power to put her under a spell so she could contemplate the nature of the universe, the purpose of love, the purpose of death, and a fantasy she sometimes had of being bound nude to a parking meter in the city.

  It was in this trancelike state that she saw Roy. What was he holding? She shut off her vacuum by yanking the plug from the wall. She opened the door.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve killed someone’s dog.”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “That’s Curtains. He belongs to my children.”

  “Curtains?”

  “It’s an old story.” And then, looking at the animal again, “Oh, dear.” She reached out and took the dog’s body from Roy and, for one moment, like an uninspired actor in the uninspired film her husband and children were just then watching, she brushed the skin of Roy’s forearm. She held his eyes, trying to remember if they’d met before.

  “Poor Curtains.”

  They had never met.

  “Oh,” Roy said. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry.” When nervous, he adopted an inflection that was not his own. His voice ratcheted up into a phony British accent, as if British accents were so appropriate, so authoritative that they could make any American dog be not dead. “I’m dreadfully sorry.” There it was. London, England, done very poorly.

  Roy hoped that maybe she’d wanted the dog dead for some reason. Maybe she’d grown tired of feeding him or accidentally petting those hard body lumps that old dogs get.

  “I’m sorry.” Roy tucked his chin in shame. “He came out of nowhere. I didn’t even have a chance to brake. I’m sorry. Let me give you some money for a new dog.” He reached for his wallet. He was broke. “What does a dog cost?” There was sixteen bucks in his wallet.

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” Susanne said. She carried the dog into the living room. “For a mutt.”

  “Oh.” He fumbled and followed her. Two hundred and fifty seemed like robbery. “Can I write you a check?” He had two hundred and sixty-seven dollars in his bank account. If he wanted, he could go to an ATM tonight and withdraw it all, long before she could cash his check.

  Susanne covered Curtains with an afghan that had been draped across the couch. She crouched in front of the dog, shielding him from Roy. What a thing for her dog to do—run out in front of a stranger’s car and open himself up. What desperation. Curtains should have come to her, Susanne thought foolishly. Don’t go to strangers, Curtains. There was blood on Roy’s jacket. Blood on her arm, in her hair. Curtains’s insides made pornographically public. Death really was mortifying. “A check is fine. Make it out to Susanne Martin.”

  “Susanne Martin. Certainly.” He found a seat and began to write.

  One surprisingly rigid paw stuck out from beneath the blanket. She knew the paw well, dipped in white fur, claws that alternated black, ivory, black, ivory. A piano on her dog’s foot. She felt the dog lose his heat. She felt his body go cold.

  As Susanne bent to hold his paw to her cheek, Roy saw that she loved the dog and he knew he wouldn’t go to the ATM. He joined her on the floor, wrapping a stiff arm around her shoulders. He stowed the check away in his jacket pocket. “Sh-h-h. There, now. There, now.”

  Roy and Susanne sat by the rigid dog. She whimpered. She sounded like a tiny door creaking open. She wept and sniffled, wept and sniffled. Roy studied the wall’s molding, the wall itself, a trace of dust along the molding’s shaped ridge, an electrical outlet. What had he been thinking before the accident? He tapped his free hand against his temple and drew a blank.

  Underneath his hand her shoulder felt cushioned in a way that his wasn’t. There was her skin. There was her muscle. There was her bone, her blood, and all the blood’s attendant particles keeping her alive, particles whose names he’d never know. They were strangers except for this dead dog. He thought of the yellow and turned toward Susanne, locating her lips with his own—some way of knowing her. Susanne did not react and, after a few slow moments with his mouth resting motionless on hers, he inserted a pointed tongue. She accepted it.

  Roy and Susanne lay back on the rug beside the dog’s carcass, beside the coffee table. Beneath the burned odor left by the vacuum, he could smell the dust still in the rug—salt and sand and dried skin from her kids, her husband, her now dead dog. Roy inhaled. And they stayed there locked in a silent trade. It wasn’t a kiss, exactly, but something equally spectacular. The night, for all the species of insects alive in it, barely noticed.

  Eventually, time passed and he buried his fingers in the hair at the nape of her neck. He pulled her closer. His other arm found the small of her back and used this handle to unlock some ancient pattern; their bodies began to move.

  * * *

  My dog died for this bit of living, Susanne thought. She did not consider her husband. She brokered no possible connection between her husband and lying on the floor with a stranger.

  * * *

  Roy’s hands moved to unfasten, unhook, undress their bodies, conducting an urgent experiment. Her face was still damp from crying. In the shock of this unexpected coupling, he pinned her to the floor and she was a bird. He found his way inside and Susanne filled the room with sound, incantations that started with the routine “Oh, yes. God, yes,” and morphed into the unfamiliar “Take it. Take it all,” before winding up at the unnatural “Paint your landscape. Storm. Storm. Storm.” Not sexy, just peculiar. Pleasure remained a far-off cousin to whatever exchange they were having.

  At last, his muscles and eyes trembled. A transfer was completed and the charge between them dimmed. A film of sweat developed some guilt, some old wonder. Both Roy and Susanne began to chill. He didn’t look at her. He was unsure what he’d got in the trade, though he knew it wasn’t inconsequential. Good for him.

  I should remove myself, he thought, and was about to when he felt something rough and warm, damp and thick. Curtains was licking the sweat from his scapula.

  With a scream, both naked man and naked woman recoiled. He rolled, boot-camp style, a protected ball, into the shelter of the baby grand. From there he eyed the dog with dread. Susanne jumped to her feet and up onto the frantic couch.

  Curtains had come back from the dead.

  The dog raised his brow, wondering why these humans should act so foolishly.

  Susanne lifted her hands in surrender. “The dog was dead.”

  “The dog was dead,” Roy confirmed. And it was true. They’d seen it and felt it. The dog, moments ago, had been ruined, limp, no more.

  “How, Suse?” Their physical intimacy had shaved away the Anne. He cradled and rocked himself, a squatting troll: a head, a rounded back, and two feet sticking out from his torso. He looked grotesque underneath the piano.

  Curtains licked the thin, pale fur between his legs.

  “My dog is alive.”

  “But why? Why is your dog alive?”

  Susanne scratched her left buttock. “You must have only knocked Curtains unconscious.”

  Roy looked from the dog to Susanne. “Then how come you don’t want to touch him either?”

  “Nonsense,” Susanne said, readjusting her position of retreat. “Come here, boy. Here, Curtains.”

  The dog looked up from his lick and made his way over to the waiting hand. Susanne held her arm as far out from her body as possible. Curtains rubbed against it and Susanne
immediately snapped her hand to her chest as if burned. She covered herself with a fleece blanket. “Back,” she told the confused dog. “Back.” Curtains, as dumb and happy as any non-dead dog, cocked his head and studied the hunkering humans before meandering into the kitchen to see if, in the time he’d been dead, someone had refilled his dish with kibble.

  Quickly, Roy crawled out from underneath the piano. “What should we do?”

  Susanne nodded. She stood, distancing herself from him. They were not a we. She dressed swiftly. Nodding, nodding, nodding. She tightened a belt around her sweater. “So,” she said, looking into the kitchen where Curtains had gone. “You’ll have to kill it. Again.”

  Roy drew his eyes wide and wider. “What? It?”

  “We’ve opened some sort of door here.” She knelt in front of Roy, resting her hands on his knees as if they really were lovers. “It can’t stay open. I have a good life.” She pinched the meat of Roy’s thighs. “You have to kill the dog.”

  He closed his eyes. Reasons and excuses assembled themselves. He was dealing with an unhinged person. He’d stumbled into a TV show. The dog had simply been knocked out.

  Roy opened his eyes. “It won’t work. That’s like stuffing a baby back inside its mother. You think I’ll just forget? I won’t forget.”

  “Yes,” Susanne said. “You will forget.”

  Once, as a girl, Susanne, alone in her grandmother’s empty barn, had heard a voice speaking to her. The voice had said, “Bow at the river,” or, maybe, “Cows at the river.” It didn’t matter what the voice had said, because Susanne, terrorized and unwilling to confront the unexplainable, the supernatural, had suppressed any memory of it. “You’ll forget.”