Dogfight

by Michael Knight

  One thing has impressed me about X since my discovery. He hasn’t brought anyone over to watch with him. When I was his age, the first thing I would have done was have a dozen friends lined up at the window eating popcorn or something. Having a secret to share made me feel important. But not X. He doesn’t want to share her. He doesn’t want to spoil whatever it is he’s feeling up there. I hope he doesn’t know that he’s splitting time with his father.

  It is almost five o’clock by the time we leave. X is very careful when dressing for the mall. He has selected a plain white T-shirt from the Gap, Levi’s jeans, and brand-new Nike high-tops. Close to two hundred dollars for the whole outfit. I had no idea. His mother did all his shopping. I have suits that cost less, and, except for the shoes, he looks like a fifties hoodlum. I half expect him to roll a pack of cigarettes in his shirtsleeve.

  We drive a while, all interstate and highway on the way to the mall, and X is quiet, maybe thinking about his CD player, maybe thinking about Grace. The breeze from the open window whips his hair. I let myself think about Grace, too. I’m not sure how I will react when I see her again in person. In the flesh, so to speak. Our meeting, as neighbors, as doctor/patient, is inevitable. I wonder sometimes if she knows that she is being watched, if the absence of curtains on her windows is deliberate, and not, as I tell myself, just because she’s new to town. I don’t think she knows that her vet lives next door—the last four days, I’ve been getting my mail under cover of darkness—but I wonder if she can feel our eyes on her, if the two of us are giving off some kind of lonely vibe. X is staring, blank-eyed, in front of us. Our thoughts of Grace fill the car as palpably as the quick air.

  “How about you roll that window up and let’s get some AC going,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes at me but does as I ask. He turns on the radio, and I turn it down a little. X does a sigh, one that is full of implications.

  “Dad, I need to ask a favor,” he says. “There’s this girl I want to ask out, and I was wondering if you’d drive us to the movies. Her parents could drive, but they’re real old, and they want to drive too much, you know. They’re happy-assed about stuff like that. They get off on participating.”

  At first, I’m panicked. He’s going to ask Grace to the movies. But that’s absurd and besides, Grace has her driver’s license. At the same time, I’m unreasonably happy that he’s asked me to be their chauffeur. I struggle to withhold a barrage of questions. I turn the radio back up.

  “Sounds like fun,” I say.

  He nods and grows remote again. A woman in an antique convertible, a DeSoto or something, passes us on X’s side. It has fins and everything, makes her look like a movie star. Both of us turn to look.

  I say, “How would you feel about your old man getting a date soon?”

  “Cool,” he says.

  “That wouldn’t bother you?” I’m surprised.

  “No way,” he says.

  “Understand that I loved your mother. I will always love your mother,” I say.

  “Mom’s dead,” he says. “She’d understand.”

  X is a man of few words, the strong, silent type. Add a scuffed leather motorcycle jacket to his outfit and he could double for Marlon Brando in The Wild One. X’s mother died of an infection resulting from her tubal ligation. Almost an unheard-of cause of death, the doctors said, but this I already knew. Even vets know a thing or two about people medicine. Sarah was alive in the hospital less than a week. I had always wanted a big family, wanted the constant clamor of children in our house, but there were medical reasons for the operation, and Sarah softened things by saying how much the idea of raising an only child appealed to her. We could spoil him rotten, give him whatever he wanted. She wouldn’t have to divide her love, she said. Two ways was enough.

  I have never actually admitted the possibility of dating again, though I have begun to entertain it more and more recently. Particularly with Sissy’s insistence and the arrival of Grace Poole. The reawakening of those boyhood desires. Naked is, after all, still naked, even to a thirty-six-year-old widower.

  The mall is massive and intimidating, but X moves through it easily, as if it were his natural habitat. He wanted me to give him the credit card and wait in the car. He told me he was a smart shopper. I told him that was quite possibly the most hysterical thing I had ever heard. He grabs my arm and jerks me along when I stop at the map to look for the stereo store. He knows where he is going and remains, always, about three paces ahead of me. In front of a store called Southern Culture, he freezes and raises his hand to me, fist clenched, like a soldier walking point. He is so definite in his motion that I go still as well. I think he must have seen that in a Vietnam movie.

  “Wait here,” he says.

  I do as I am told. X weaves through the steady flow of shoppers, across the wide aisle, to three girls who look about his age. They are standing in front of a pet store, one of those places where the animals are caged behind a glass wall. The girls look happy to see X. He gives them all a smile and pushes his fingers through his hair, his mother’s hair, weightless and golden. They laugh at something he says and one of the girls, the prettiest, lays a hand on his shoulder. X doesn’t acknowledge the hand, lets her leave it there, waits for them to finish laughing. He’s doing an eyebrow raise, as if surprised that they could find him so funny, so charming. My son is a natural. He would probably do better with Grace Poole than I would. X looks over his shoulder at me, casually, sees me watching, and gives me a dirty look. I spin around to face the shop window. Southern Culture specializes in reproduction antebellum antiques. Polymers where there should be pine. Porch jockeys with machine-induced paint chips.

  In the window directly in front of me is an awkward-looking fake antique telephone, black with brass cradle and receivers, the works. I don’t think there were telegraphs before the Civil War, much less telephones, but seeing it there makes me wonder what Grace Poole could be up to with all those phones. Her conversations only last a minute or two and she takes notes while she is talking. I never heard of a phone sex girl taking notes, except maybe to get credit card numbers, and she does too much writing for that to be the explanation.

  X returns and leads me to the stereo store. He has a short discussion with the salesgirl, who is very attractive and all business. She is wearing a tan, ankle-length skirt, slit open to the knee. She is impressed with my son’s knowledge of electronics and shows me the model that he wants. It holds ten CDs and is apparently the only type made on earth that can continue playing while the carriage is ejected and still rotating. On sale for $1,300, speakers and receiver not included. I ask if that’s a feature he absolutely must have.

  “It’s the best, Dad,” he says. “Think of it as a long-term investment.”

  X has one arm crossed at his stomach, cupping the elbow of the other arm in his palm. He is stroking his chin, one foot forward, weight back, as if regarding a masterpiece of art.

  “Tell me again,” I say. “Whose child are you?”

  The salesgirl looks from X to the CD player and back to X.

  “He’ll definitely be getting his money’s worth, Dad,” she says.

  “It is, unfortunately, and I’m sure much to both of your disappointments, not his money,” I say.

  We settle on something more reasonable.

  In the car, X is again silent. I have embarrassed him both in front of his friends by staring and in front of the salesperson by being cheap. Six hundred dollars isn’t cheap in my estimation, but clearly X is disappointed. I resent his sullenness and try to get him talking again.

  “What about Grace Poole?” I say. “Our new neighbor.”

  He tenses a little but doesn’t look at me.

  “What about her?” he says.

  “You know, for my date,” I say. “We could double. Miss Poole and I could go to the movies with you and your girlfriend.”

  X turns his head slowly to look at me. He is angry. Before the last words are out of my mouth, I understand that
it was the wrong thing to say, that I said it to provoke him. He gives me a mean, shallow laugh.

  “She’s so out of your league,” he says.

  Three months after Sarah died, I broke X’s wrist. We were on the lawn playing football and he was running wildly by me, at the point in our game when I would let him go past me, through the pair of apple trees we used as a goal line. Let him do his touchdown dance, spike the ball, spread his arms like wings, and prance in a circle. I ran after him and caught him from behind, wrapping him up, jarring the ball loose, driving him down. His arm went out to brace himself and the wrist snapped audibly. X carried his cast, proudly, like a club.

  X won’t let me help him assemble his new stereo. He doesn’t even allow me to help him carry it from the car. I return to the study, lock the door behind me, and take up my binoculars. Grace is on the phone, a pink one this time, and she is wearing a cream-colored bra, but that is all, like she was just getting ready to dress when the phone rang. She scratches a pencil across a pad, tears the sheet loose, and jams it down on a thin spike attached to a metal base. I can’t see the dog. Grace never does get up to dress, which I am glad of, just keeps on answering the phones, first one, then another, putting one on hold and coming back to it. She is a popular lady. I can’t figure out the phones.

  It isn’t long before my house is full of music. I go out of the study and stand at the bottom of the stairwell to let the sound come down to me more clearly. There are long windows on either side of the front door leaking weak light into the foyer. The song that X is playing sounds familiar, something from the seventies, heavy with feedback guitars, but I can’t put my finger on its name. Probably, I heard it on the office radio. Sissy likes that sort of music, calls it classic. And suddenly, I’m remembering Sarah and me, trying to manhandle a piano through the front door of our farmhouse. X was maybe seven, too small to help, so he supervised. The piano was on a dolly, but even so we kept banging it into walls and furniture, filling the house with resonant discord, and the air was full of the smell of hay grass—someone was always cutting hay out there, if not on our land then on the next farm down the road. Just follow the white wooden fence—a sweet smell, like the cakes Sarah would try to bake and botch, more often than not, leaving them in the oven too long or screwing up the recipe. Dessert was the most hilarious time of day in our house, cakes looking like deflated footballs, pies blackened like bituminous coal. It made me hungry, that smell. I was always hungry in Loudon County.

  X was trying to talk his mother into letting him have a horse just before she died. He had nearly convinced her to break her promise. She was, after all, the one who wanted to spoil him. X guaranteed that he would let us choose the horse, if he was allowed to give it a name. For X, this was a major concession. I never said anything directly to him, but after he was asleep and Sarah and I were alone in bed, I would argue against this idea—not the horse itself but X choosing the name. A horse is too noble an animal. I see horses every day with ridiculous, childish names, I said. Black Beauty, Sox, Paint. I had a patient called Fanny. It’s degrading to them, Sarah. She told me that if there was going to be a horse, which there probably wouldn’t, it would be X’s and X should name it. She would prop her back against the headboard and smoke cigarettes, tipping ashes into a ceramic bowl on her lap. Smoking was her secret vice; she didn’t want X to know that his mother sanctioned such a nasty habit. What are you talking about, Byron? she’d say. You’re the one that’s being juvenile. I wonder now what name he would have chosen. The boy who has nicknamed himself after a letter in the alphabet.

  When I take up my binoculars again, Grace is nowhere to be found. Almost a half hour passes, the light fading between our homes, without a trace of her. She must have gone up for the night. She is X’s until dawn. I would like to creep upstairs and stand in his doorway, the door just slightly open, and watch him watching her. Not to catch him red-handed but just to look at him, see if he is the same sort of voyeur as his father.

  Grace comes running down the stairs into my line of sight. She stops in the middle of the room, breathless, harried, and stands there, one hand pushed up into that mass of brown hair, holding it back away from her forehead. Her lips are moving, but I can’t see who she’s talking to. She walks over to the black phone, picks it up and starts to dial, then stops and drops the receiver on the table and runs back upstairs. When she returns, the dog is in her arms, her back arched under its weight. Candle is not moving in a way that is frightening. Not loose and recently dead but stiff, body wracked with sporadic trembling. My first thought is Lyme disease, but that’s unlikely. The disease is carried by ticks that don’t exist in the city. I saw it dozens of times in the country.

  Grace lays Candle on the table, using her elbow to move the phones. She finds a phone book and begins rifling through it, back, then forward again, as if she were having trouble concentrating. I realize, suddenly, that she is looking for my number. I retrieve my own phone book from the desk drawer and look for her name, but it isn’t there. That makes sense, she’s new to town. Besides, I couldn’t call her. She would know that I had been spying on her.

  I watch her stop turning pages, watch her dial and speak into the receiver, but my phone never rings. I think, at first, that she has called another vet, that she didn’t like me when I met Candle the first time. I’m crushed. But, finally, my phone rings. It is Sissy. She’s manning the office line tonight.

  “Get your act together,” she says. “We’ve got an emergency call. Grace Poole. Her dog is sick. Maybe tonight’s your big chance, Dr. Shaw. A woman with a sick dog. She’ll be super vulnerable.” She waits a moment for me to laugh and, when I don’t, becomes professional again. “The dog is paralyzed except for muscle spasms. She’s coming in.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “I’ll be right there.”

  I am holding the binoculars in one hand, the phone in the other. Grace has disappeared upstairs, momentarily, and returns carrying a bundle of clothes. I watch her dress. She pulls on walking shorts, cut high and flattering, and a T-shirt. She is barefoot and doesn’t bother with underwear. Candle, she gathers in her arms, and burdened with the dog, she can’t open the door. It is all I can do not to go outside, cross the little alley between us, and help her.

  I wait until I hear Grace’s car door close, hear the engine start. Wait until her headlights pass my window, casting shadows, before I get up to leave. I find X in the foyer, sitting at the bottom of the stairs. It is almost dark and he is brushed with the last delicate light from the street.

  “I want to go,” he says.

  We look at each other for a long moment, neither of us speaking. X is still wearing his mall clothes. He looks worried but never takes his eyes away from mine. For an instant, I think I see something familiar in his face, something that I recognize. It is at those moments, when the veneer of his confidence has cracked just a little, when he shows, like light creeping under a doorway, in his eyes, in the set of his mouth, traces of being a boy, that I imagine a little of myself in him. It is at those moments when I love him most.

  “Okay,” I say.

  My clinic is only a few blocks away, but the drive is intolerable. I force myself to go slowly, to brake at every stop sign, to signal at every corner. X won’t look at me, keeps his eyes on other people’s houses, the warmth of their lighted windows. Grace is crying by the time we reach the office, sitting Indian-style in one of the plastic waiting room chairs. There are circles of dirt on the balls of her feet, and I can see a shadow on her thigh made by the leg of her shorts. I remember that she isn’t wearing underwear. When we come in, she wipes her eyes and tries to fix her hair, which is wild and spiraling. She is very beautiful like that. X is wide-eyed. I think he is amazed to be seeing her in person, amazed that she exists beyond those windows.

  I can’t think of a suitable colloquialism, so I say, “It’s going to be all right, Miss Poole.”

  Sissy an
d the dog are in the examination room waiting for me. Candle is still trembling, her I.D. tag clinking against the examination table’s metal surface.

  “Her temperature is high,” Sissy says. “That’s all I knew to do until you got here.”

  “Lyme disease,” I say.

  I look around the door to the waiting room. X is sitting about four chairs over from Grace, looking petrified, eyes glued to the floor.

  “Miss Poole, has this dog been out of the city recently? Camping or something?” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “About a week ago.”

  “Any ticks on her?”

  “A few,” she says. She is calming some.

  “Good,” I say. “I’ll get her fixed up.”

  I wish I could stop talking like a country doctor, just for a minute. I push my fingers through Candle’s fur until I find what I’m looking for, the bull’s eye reddening of a tick bite at her shoulder. I give the dog a muscle relaxant to stop the spasms and a shot of tetracycline for the Lyme’s, because it won’t hurt her either way. I have Sissy take a blood sample. These are the things I understand. This is the place where I know what I am doing. I stroke the dog, pulling all that loose skin out straight, then letting it wrinkle up again, until she quiets. I whisper nonsense in her ear. Pretty dog, pretty dog. Tell your mother good things about Dr. Shaw.