Dogfight

by Michael Knight

  Sleeping with My Dog

  Holly undressed at the Laundromat. It seemed natural for her to slip out of faded jeans and toss them into the washer with the rest of her load, leaving her in a white ribbed tank top and white panties. She was tan and very blond. I had been watching my own clothes roll in the jet-dry and now I was watching her. It was impossible not to. She turned and met my eyes and smiled, not embarrassed. She was nothing I had ever seen. She was miraculous.

  “Are you a mechanic?” she said, mistaking the grout under my fingernails from making mosaics for motor oil. Her voice was a hoarse gift, a delightful surprise.

  Holly tells the story of our meeting at dinners, and she told it to her employer when I visited her at work. When she tells it, it is a somewhat different story, more funny, because of the way she describes my facial expression. Her version replaces magic with guile and charm. People laugh and congratulate us on our luck and Holly on her lack of inhibition. Fate is often mentioned.

  The two of us, though, don’t really talk about the Laundromat when we are alone. It is acknowledged as the place we met, but we do not discuss it. I wonder about that day often, have almost reminded her of it a thousand times but I’m afraid that it will just be an ordinary thing for her, that she slides out of jeans every time she does the wash, displaying her long runner’s legs without discrimination. I want it to stay the way I remember it.

  I told my brother, Mason, about this one day because I could never keep a secret. My brother, Mason, who is divorced and carries an Old Maid card in his wallet for good luck. It didn’t feel properly like a secret, lacked a secret’s weight, until I told someone.

  “You’ve lost your balls,” he said. “You’ve positively lost your balls.”

  Holly moved in with me but that was some time coming. She joked, when I called the first time, that it was against her policy to date a man who didn’t have his own washer and dryer. She said that for all she knew I could be a maniac, haunting Laundromats and convenience stores, looking for pretty girls. I said, if that was the case, then why had she given me her number? She didn’t have an answer for that. We were quiet a moment. I have a feeling about you, she said.

  I live in a hunting cabin in lower Alabama on a lake filled with dead cypress trees. It was abandoned by my grandfather years ago. There is a stillness here, a quiet that I like, that gives no hint that the lake was dug by bulldozers or that the cypress would still be living if not for the imposition of the water.

  The quiet helps my work, prevents distraction while I mosaic. Holly laughed, barely managing to stifle it, when I told her what I did for a living.

  I said, “I’m trying to perpetuate a dying art.”

  “That’s quite a responsibility,” she said.

  Really what I do is mosaic picture frames and preshaped vases and ashtrays, whatever, and sell them in craft stores.

  I like the meticulousness of it, the slow laying on of cut glass, arranging the pieces according to shape and color and watching the pattern slowly materialize. It’s like working a jigsaw puzzle without knowing beforehand how the finished product will look. Then, I cover the whole thing with the gritty, black grout and wipe it away with mineral spirits to reveal the image a second time.

  * * *

  This evening Holly is helping me mosaic. She is home early from work. I showed her, when she moved in, how to cover the shapes with grout, smooth it evenly into the cracks between pieces of glass. If the night is clear and the light lasting, we do this often, sit on the grass on yards of spread newspaper next to the lake. And the mist will rise ghostlike along the water’s edge, as if it didn’t mind that the lake was man-made—that was in a small way surprising to me—as if it had known that rise forever.

  Holly is working with a piece of old flannel shirt, and her lips are pursed at the vase she is holding. She is terrifyingly beautiful like that. Didn’t Socrates or someone say that? Beauty is the only truly terrifying thing on earth. But I look at her and think it’s good that I’m a little afraid. A nice scared, exhilarating—like being at a movie thriller and your date’s fingernails on your arm, suddenly, are more frightening than what’s happening on screen. Maybe she is afraid some, too.

  “What are you thinking?” I say.

  She says, “I want a dog.”

  “I’m sorry I asked,” I say.

  The mineral spirits smell wintery.

  “I want a dog,” she says. “Everything here is either yours or mine. My prints, your furniture. My clothes and your clothes. I want something that can be ours.”

  “We have joint ownership of all canned goods and Lean Cuisines,” I say.

  “I mean it,” she says. “My family always had dogs. A dog will make this place seem like somebody actually lives here.”

  “I’m not enough protection for you?” I say, smiling. “Or maybe you’d like me to jump up and lick your face when you come home from work.”

  She puts the vase down and rubs her face with the back of her hand, leaving a black streak, like athletes’ sun guard, under her eye.

  “You know what I mean, Banks,” she says. “It’s too quiet in the woods. Dogs make lots of noise. That reminds me. I have to go on a New York trip with Alexander next week. It’s a step up for me. A permanent traveling position maybe.”

  Alexander is her boss. Holly is a buyer for a local retail chain. Alexander is grooming her, I hear. She is grinning contentedly. There would be a dog, a boyfriend, and a boss who appreciated her in her life now.

  I hear the phone ringing and Holly says, “Mine,” and stands and jogs toward the house.

  I had been thinking of my brother, Mason, of his divorce and his own dog custody battle. Of Mason on his front porch, beyond drunk, with his chocolate Lab lying across his feet. He was talking to the dog. “She’s gone, Brett. Your mama left us high and dry.” The dog was quite obviously shattered.

  When we were boys our father would sometimes let us sleep out in the kennel, much to my mother’s dismay. We had six dogs, three Labs, an Irish setter, and two Boykin spaniels. Mason and I would play Lord of the Dogs, child rulers of a canine kingdom. We could communicate with animals and would pace back and forth in the run on all fours, growling and whining commands to our loyal and devoted subjects. The eight of us would sleep in a pile, indistinguishable, one from the others, in the darkness. The dogs had a smell like that, with Mason and I wedged among them, warm and musty, familiar, safe smelling.

  This was a fairly regular event until two of the Labs tore each other’s throats out before my father could separate them, when the setter came into season. We had the dogs for years and my father said that he had never, not in all his life, seen anything like it. He got rid of all of them after that. A dog is something to ask of me.

  But with the mention of Alexander and New York these thoughts vanish. I picture his wolfish, possessive eyes. His smooth, clean hands on the back of her neck. His suits and shining shoes. When Alexander and I met, he told me he knew his business inside and out, if I knew what he meant. He nodded toward one of the saleswomen in the store.

  The screen door to the porch slams shut, and I turn and see Holly standing on the steps. She is wearing jeans and a hunter green V-neck sweater over a T-shirt. Her hands are in her pockets. Her cheek is still smudged with grout.

  “Wrong number,” she says. “It was somebody for Willy.”

  A dog is easy. At this moment, I would swallow glass for her.

  In the morning, while Holly is at work, Mason and I drive to the ASPCA and pick out a rawboned, year-old golden retriever. He is pale-furred, blond, with hair at his neck the same color as Holly’s that fans out like a mane.

  The man at the pound says, “He’s only been in one day. You’re lucky.”

  Mason says, “Is he purebred?”

  “Yep, got papers and everything,” the man says. “He won’t eat, though. A neighbor called and reported his owner beating him with a two-by-four.”

  “You know I think this is stupid, right
?” Mason says to me.

  The dog is thin, yes, his ribs like etchings, but there is something noble about him. In the way he sits, textbook perfect, show-dog straight. When he opens his mouth to let his tongue lag, it looks like he is smiling.

  As soon as Holly walks in the door that night and leans down, smiling brightly, to touch him, the dog breaks for the back of the house, paws slipping and skidding on the hardwood. Holly looks hurt. I find him in the bathroom, pressing himself to the wall behind the toilet. He refuses to be coaxed out. I tug at his tail, but it is as tight and desperate as a bowstring.

  Holly is sitting on the couch when I return, legs drawn up beneath her, a book pressed against her chest. I haven’t turned any of the lights on yet, and the room is shadowy, filling with evening. It looks cold, though it isn’t.

  “I was told his owner beat him,” I say. “It must’ve been a woman. That’s why he ran from you.”

  “He’s a he? He’s beautiful,” she says, her voice small. “He won’t come out?”

  I shake my head. I flip on the light, and the shadows are chased to the ceiling. Holly puts her feet down.

  “I knew you would get him,” she says. “I brought you this for while I’m gone.” She hands me the book. A Hunting Dog’s Handbook. “Teach him some tricks.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “You name him.”

  “He’s lovely,” she says and stands and walks into the kitchen.

  Sunday evening, I drive Holly to the airport, and Alexander is there waiting for us. He takes her carry-on from me and guides her through the metal detector, his hand in the small of her back. Holly says, “I’ll miss you. Tell the dog good-bye.”

  The days without Holly aren’t hard for me. I can fill them easily enough. It’s the nights that are less than wonderful. The first morning, I wake with the dog sitting leonine and perfect at my side of the bed. I get up and fix both of us breakfast, coffee for me, Alpo for him, but he won’t eat until I empty a can of cold chicken soup on his food, a trick my father taught me.

  The dog—I name him Pancho, temporarily, until Holly’s return—does not leave my side all day. I spread my mosaics out on the porch, working at them halfheartedly, and he stretches out in the grass not ten feet from me and does not move. The sunlight on the glass makes prism reflections on my hands.

  “Run around,” I tell him. “Go do dog stuff. Dig a hole.”

  He raises his head, letting his tongue hang out, and looks at me. Behind him is the lake and in it the cypress stumps, standing in the water like ruined columns. Pancho smiles and waits.

  I teach him to sit for Fritos. He fetches a wooden coat hanger that I found unoccupied in Holly’s closet. Either he has had some experience with these things or Pancho is a genius.

  When I turn my back on him to work, he butts his head softly against me, between my shoulder blades, until I free a hand to pet him. I learn to hold a vase between my feet, while I wipe away grout with one hand and scratch Pancho with the other. It is fall and his fur is full of static.

  Holly calls at night, and Pancho follows me to the phone. Her voice is full of energy. She has seen Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangasomething at a fashion show. Or she and Alex—it is now Alex—had the most wonderful dinner at the Russian Tea Room. I forget to ask their sleeping arrangements.

  I myself cannot sleep. The quiet is pervasive, coming off the lake and filling the air like mist. The bed feels uneven, tilted, without Holly’s subtle weight tugging at me from the other side.

  I think of letting Pancho into bed with me but decide not to at first. I will let Holly do that if she wants. It will be her decision. And so the door to the bedroom stays shut and for a while the dog gently butts it, then stops. I wonder where he has gone. If he is in the living room in front of the dying fire, like a picture, or in the bathroom across the hall on the tile. I feel guilty and step to the door in the dark, crack it and call his name. He trots past me and hops onto the bed, and I crawl in with him, me under the covers, him on top. I gave him a bath this morning, and he still smells soapy and clean, so I don’t worry about Holly noticing fleas in the bed. I just lie there breathing him in, trying to imagine what his name was before me, and thinking that maybe I’ll be able to sleep.

  But I begin to wonder about Holly in New York, where it is never this quiet, about Alexander, Alex, tapping at her door and telling her he is too excited to sleep. She will be filled with that same warm, liquory tingle of excitement and will let him in.

  There are tiny feathers poking through the down comforter where it is worn in places, and I pull them all the way through, making a small mound on the pillow next to me. After a few hours, my eyes adjust completely to the darkness, and I can see the room as if it were daylight. The place on the dresser where her jewelry box usually sits. A bowler hat, hers, on the armchair next to the sweatshirt I wore today. There are times, I think, when no light at all is better than just enough to make a difference.

  Alex drove Holly from the airport. I was supposed to pick her up, but they took an earlier flight. That they left early might be a good sign. His headlights draw hieroglyphs in shadow against the wall.

  Holly explodes into the room, leaving the door open, and Pancho tightens, growling, and presses against my shins.

  “Hello, baby,” Holly says to the dog. “I brought you something.” She pulls a studded leather collar from her purse and twirls it on her finger.

  “I’m not sure that’s his style,” I say. She leans over the back of the couch and kisses me, then vaults it to sit beside me.

  “It’s definitely his style,” she says. We kiss again, harder, lingering, Holly pressing herself against me, pushing me back against the cushions. Pancho wedges his head between our knees.

  “Well,” I say, “aren’t you excited.”

  “Juiced,” she says. “Reborn. This is the ten-thousand-volt Holly. New York is another world.”

  She pulls away and walks a circle around the couch, stretching, shaking out the airplane kinks. She looks so alive, untouchable, like at the Laundromat with that impossible smile. She stands tiptoe to straighten a bouquet of dried roses she has hung above the door. I swear that where she walks the room gets brighter.

  “You hungry?” I say. “I could fix us some dinner.”

  “Ravenous,” she says.

  “Stay put,” I say. “I’ll put something together.”

  “I want to watch you cook,” she says and follows me into the kitchen, hands on my hips, taking wide steps so that her feet fall outside my own. She hops up on the counter.

  “Take your clothes off,” she says.

  “What?” I say. I take a package of spaghetti from the cabinet.

  “I want you to cook naked for me,” she says. “Maybe just an apron. Parade around the kitchen like a woman in a porno movie.”

  She is smiling, drumming her nails. Pancho is watching us from the doorway.

  “You’re awfully frisky,” I say. “Should I wear my heels?” I turn on the tap and begin rooting under the sink for a pot.

  “I mean it,” she says.

  I straighten up and look at her. She slips off the counter and leans into me again. The water spatters hotly out of the sink onto my back and my hands, where I’m bracing myself. Pancho rumbles and takes a step into the room.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. “We’re not hurting each other. She’s not hurting me.”

  Holly takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom. She closes the door when the dog tries to follow and says, “Sorry, sweet boy.”

  I imagine that there is something different about her lovemaking, the way her hips and hands move. Her tongue seems hard and violent in my mouth. Not the same. Asleep later, she kicks the covers and twists on the mattress. For a long time, I try to make my breathing match hers, but I can’t for more than a few seconds. Her breathing is impatient and irregular.

  I have to stop sleeping with my dog. When Holly leaves the second time, for Los Angeles, I try to resist Pancho’s scratching, but
eventually I give in and let him sleep with me. I clean dog hair from the blankets every morning. I don’t know what Holly would say if she knew, probably nothing good. I tell Mason and he says, “Dogs are dogs and should be treated accordingly.” I tell him that I read in some book that the most well-behaved dogs are house dogs, dogs that are comfortable with people. Dogs that sleep with their owners. I don’t admit that I made this last part up.

  Twice before she left I drove to see Holly at work, leaving Pancho in the back of the truck watching the door expectantly for my return. I would find her in the showroom and lead her away from Alex and the other salespeople, and she told me each time, “No, I will not make love to you in the dressing room.” I pretended that I was only teasing, and she smiled and kept her arms firmly between us. The pressure of her arms was at least something.

  Pancho and I walk what seems like five hundred miles while she is gone, following the old logging trails through the ginhouse field and Butcher’s Field, named when this was still hunting ground. I can’t work. Mosaicing makes me restless, is overwhelmingly tedious. Some nights Pancho wakes me with his dreaming. He is on his side on top of the covers, his whole body shaking, paws churning. I wonder if he’s having the same dream that I’ve been having. The one where Holly is coming down the steps of an airplane. It is a propeller plane and the tarmac is wet, like some sentimental forties movie. Humphrey Bogart should be there. And I’m standing on the runway, holding this big ball of light with both hands, waiting to give it to her. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know it’s something important.

  I call her hotel all the third day, but there is no one around until evening. Alexander answers.

  “Alexander, hi. It’s me, Banks,” I say. “Is Holly there? Have I called your room by mistake?”

  We have a bad connection. The static sounds like rushing water.

  “Hey there,” he says. “Hello from the City of Angels.”

  I suddenly see him crumpling paper next to the mouthpiece to simulate line interference. But that’s ridiculous. I rap the side of my head with my knuckles to stop myself thinking that way.