Dogfight

by Michael Knight

  “I think Rachel felt she needed some protection from me,” Richard says.

  “You’re the one that needs protecting around here,” Gin says over her shoulder, disappearing into the kitchen.

  Widow Friar says, “We were just about to tell some more Wiley stories. You’re not a Latin teacher, too, are you?”

  “As they say in Rome,” he says, smiling at me, “not if my life depended on it.”

  I follow Gin into the kitchen, carrying the wine with me. She is sliding the potatoes into the oven, the hot red light from the stove glowing on her face. There are no electric lights on in the kitchen either. I finish my wine, refill the glass, finish it again quickly, and pour another. The drinking makes my face warm.

  “Ride ’em, buckaroo,” Gin says, wagging a finger at my glass.

  “Buckaroo?”

  “That’s my motif for the night. Wild West,” she says. “See?” She puts one foot forward, heel on the ground, toe up, to show me her brown suede cowboy boots. Her jeans are tucked into them. She totters a little with all her weight on one leg and grabs my shirtsleeve for balance.

  I take the wine and the steaks and carry them into the backyard. Someone has already started the grill and I pass my hand over the surface to check the temperature. The steaks hiss one by one as I lay them on the grill, drawing little tips of flame up from the charcoal. Inside, Richard was telling a story about when he used to counsel at a juvenile prison. Apparently, there was a young girl, sixteen, who was continually escaping, because her boyfriend said that if she didn’t get out and come back to him, he would come over the wall and kill her. Each time she escaped and was brought back her sentence was extended, and each time her sentence was extended she tried to escape. They finally had to send her to an adult facility.

  Richard said, “Actually she was a pretty nice girl but that’s not the kind of love I want to fall in.” Everyone laughed, even me.

  “Hey there,” Richard says behind me, startling me. He sits on the bench of a red cedar picnic table. Somewhere, I can hear a dog barking and rattling a fence.

  “Nice ladies,” he says.

  “I’m glad you finally got to meet everybody,” I say. “You’ll have to come over later and see my place.”

  He looks over his shoulder to check the door and looks back, grinning wildly, rubbing his palms together. “Actually, your place isn’t where I hope to end up later. Look out behind you,” he says, pointing.

  Flames are jumping up around two steaks and I pour a little wine on them. I offer him the bottle but he waves it off. A car door closes on another street, an engine starts. The patio is littered with leaves and they crunch under my feet.

  “Tonight’s the night with Rachel,” he says. “I can feel it in my bones.”

  “Good luck, I guess.”

  “Have you got something going with one of them?” he says. “No, wait. Let me guess. Is it Gin? She’s a sexy one.”

  I don’t answer. I am suddenly angry at him. The music from the house stops, and we face each other, quiet, then it comes back on.

  “Play nice,” I say.

  Richard looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.

  “You bet.” He stands and goes back inside.

  I knock back my wine and wipe my mouth with my sleeve. I toss the glass hard against the back fence, but it doesn’t break, just hits the chain link, bouncing end over end, and settles on the grass. The glass is rimmed with moonlight and raised slightly by the stiff blades of grass, held up like a gift offered on a satin pillow.

  When I go back inside everyone is laughing. Richard waves his arms at me, for a moment laughing too hard to speak.

  “Wiley, Wiley, thank God you’re here,” he says. “I need help desperately.”

  He is sitting in one of the armchairs, and Rachel is standing behind him, wearing his sport coat.

  “Tell these ladies that gay men are sex fiends,” he says.

  “Sure they are.” I shrug, play along.

  “Baloney. They fall in love like everybody else. Why would they be hornier than regular couples?” the Widow says.

  “They’re both men,” Gin says. Then to Richard, “You’ve spilled some wine on your tie. Take that thing off and let me get something on it before the stain sets.”

  She begins to unknot his tie, but he pushes her hands away and she straightens up, hands on her hips, like she’s faced with a stubborn eight-year-old.

  “I’m trained in psychology,” Richard says, pulling his tie through his collar and handing it to Gin. He looks around her hip at us. “I’ve seen a lot of those boys and I’m saying some of the sweetest ones could suck a golf ball through a garden hose.”

  Ashlynn says, “What does that tell us about you, Richard?”

  We all laugh, and Richard goes red in the face. I take two or three gulps from the bottle and hold it out to the room, offering it. Rachel says, “There’s the other bottle. We have discovered the culprit.”

  I lean against the door frame and lick my lips. Wine makes me sleepy so I can never tell if I’m drunk. Everyone is watching me, even, I think, the fish, bumping up against the glass on my side of the tank.

  “Easy on the vino,” Gin says.

  “In vino veritas,” I say.

  “I’ve got to get this tie,” she says, taking the bottle on her way to the kitchen.

  Richard says, “I never let your secret out about the wine.”

  Rachel’s hand is on his shoulder, and he reaches his fingers up, drowsily, absentmindedly, to find hers. Right at that moment, seeing the way their fingers thread together, so naturally that neither of them seems to notice the gesture, I know that they are going to make love.

  I creep up behind Gin in the kitchen, sweeping her hair aside with one hand, and kiss her neck. She is at the sink dabbing club soda on Richard’s tie. The faucet is running. My other hand is curved around her belly, fingers at her middle. She pats my cheek. Her stomach is soft, and she smells of soap and shampoo. I kiss her again, behind the ear and turn her to face me. The room is dark except for a block of wavery light falling through the doorway. I hear Richard laughing in the other room. Gin rests her hand on my chest, wetting my shirt with her fingertips and she smiles sweetly. I kiss her on the lips, leaning into her, and for an instant, she is kissing back but she turns her head, straining her chin away from me, so I kiss her cheek, her throat, her eyes, pushing my legs against hers, mashing our chests together. She twists away, out from under my arms, and leaves me panting, bracing myself against the sink.

  “Whoa, horse. That’s it,” she says. She is breathing hard as well, angry, one hand, palm up, between us in the air, like she is trying to stop traffic.

  I go outside and flip the steaks but after the first three, I stop. They are black and ruined on one side, still blood red on the other. All of this shouldn’t upset me so much. It is a wonderful night. Today’s clouds have all broken up, leaving the sky empty but for scattered stars and a huge cue-ball moon. The air is cool and pleasant. But I can’t stop picturing Richard and Rachel together with Macy asleep in the next room or Macy barefooting down the hall to stand in her mother’s doorway, the door left open in case she cried in the night. Even so, she isn’t my daughter. I have no blood ties with these women or their children. I should put everything, all of this, out of my mind.

  The house next to Gin’s is vacant and the grass in the backyard is knee high. Beyond that, over a chain link fence, is Rachel’s house and I can see from here that the TV is on, flicking blue light against the sliding glass doors that face the backyard. I go over the fence smoothly, through the grass without making a sound, and over the other side into Rachel’s yard. The sliding glass door is locked. Tammy is asleep on the couch in front of the television. I circle the house, trying windows until I find one that is unlocked at Rachel’s bedroom.

  As I’m crawling through, my ankle gets caught in something, the phone cord, and I lose my balance and the phone and I go crashing to the floor. I lie perfectly still, not
even breathing, listening for signs of life from the other room. I can barely hear the dial tone, then the operator telling me to please hang up, and over both of those, voices and distant applause from the television. But no Tammy.

  I stand and tiptoe down the hall to Macy’s room. She is sleeping on her stomach, one hand on the pillow next to her, her fingers curled under. Her lips are parted slightly. I bend and lift her from the bed, over the guardrail her mother has attached. She whines a little and twists in my hands but gives up quickly and settles against my chest, her head and smooth hair against my cheek. She is so warm. Nothing is as warm, almost feverish, as a sleeping child.

  “Shhh,” I say. “Hush now, Macy, baby. It’s just me,” and I walk her over to the window bouncing her a little on my toes, as I have seen mothers do. I don’t know if Macy is too old for that but it doesn’t matter. She turns her head and breathes on my neck.

  I stand there for a long time, holding her, turning my hips slowly back and forth, looking at nothing in the backyard. A coiled garden hose. A red plastic child-sized football. Pine cones. I listen, trying to hear past the TV and the house creaking and settling its weight, for someone calling my name but no one is looking for me. Way off, lightly, I can hear a siren, flaring up and fading quickly, never coming close. The thing that I can’t stop hearing is Macy’s breathing, her and the night breathing, as gentle and sure as anything in the world.

  Rachel will be home soon, probably with Richard. I lift Macy up, holding her at arm’s length in the soft gray light, that curious light that you can only see at night. A combination of weak lights. She is almost weightless in my hands, just the barest pressure on my palms and wrists.

  Her eyes are closed, her head lolling forward, and I shake her gently to wake her. I feel like I should tell her something, something important, but I can’t think of anything. I try to remember all of the things my mother and father told me. Nothing seems to fit. In a minute or two, I will put her back into bed and leave the house the way I came in and no one, not even Macy, will know that I was here. She will think that she was dreaming. But maybe, if I can muster the right words, some of the dream will stay with her. I want to tell her something that only I know, that only I, of all people on earth, could possibly explain.

  I think to tell her about love, what little I know of it, but I understand, there with the moonlight lying between us, that she doesn’t need to be told. It is in her blood and touch and dreams, perfect and pure as an angel’s wing.

  Macy looks at me expectantly, a little confused but her face calm, eyes open wide. I remember, suddenly, what Solon told Croesus, the story that I told my class. Every day brings the possibility of change. You can’t judge a man’s happiness until he is dead.

  I start to tell this to Macy but she draws in a breath, as if she is going to speak. She doesn’t say anything, just holds it for a moment, her face ashen and smooth in the light, and lets it out with a patient sigh, a thing so adult, so beautiful, I nearly let her fall. All at once my arms are full of sand, and I pull her to my chest and hold her tightly against me. She is so small. She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t even know enough to have dreams that won’t come true.

  “Just sleep,” I tell her. That is enough for now.

  Tenant

  My landlady died in the fire that consumed her house, but the rescue squad was able to pull her unconscious dog, Shiloh, out of the flames and breathe life back into him. They revived him by wrapping a hand around his muzzle to keep it closed and huffing air into his nose. He woke—I am told; I was passed out drunk at the time—coughing up smoke like an old man. I live in an old slave cottage behind the main house that Mrs. Cunningham restored for renters. One of the firemen roused me some time later and I stumbled out onto the lawn in my underwear, already hung over. The fire was nearly out and the house was soaked and shadowy in the darkness, a faint mist rising from the walls and tiny, still burning embers winking in the wasted frame like cigarettes.

  Shiloh was an enormous German shepherd, who relished tipping my trash cans and who couldn’t get past his genetic predisposition for shepherding. Each day when I returned from work he met me at the car, determined to prevent me from reaching my front door. He circled me growling, rushed to block my passage, cut me into ever-shrinking corners. Charlotte, the woman I’d been seeing, was terrified of him and, in her defense, he did have forty pounds on her. He was big enough, upright, to pin my shoulders to the car with his paws and look me in the eye. I complained when I first moved to the farm, when Mrs. Cunningham was still alive, but she was at least seventy-five and could no more control Shiloh than I. She would grin and shake her head, as if he were a beloved only child and she found his bad habits endearing. I couldn’t bring myself to demand that she leave the flower garden, where she spent her mornings, to collect the trash that was scattered in my yard. The very thought of a woman her age stooping to retrieve a paper plate made me shiver with guilt. Charlotte called the mess my own little garden, a lawn of perennials, she said, coffee filter buds, planted in TV dinner cartons, blooming each morning on liquor bottle stems.

  When the policeman in charge of the fire scene had finished questioning me—Had I seen anything suspicious? No. Did I know Mrs. Cunningham to be unhappy? I did not—I called Charlotte. She had stayed home to study for the test I was giving the next day. I teach history at the little college in town. Charlotte was what the college calls a “continuing education” student, so she was in my class though she was four years my senior, a fact that did not exempt our relationship from the college’s strict noninvolvement policy. She skipped college the first time around to try her hand at acting in Los Angeles but told me that all she did out West was hone her waitressing skills.

  She was sleeping when I called but came out anyway, and we stood at my window, watching sirens flashing silently, men with smudged faces moving through the pinkish light in wet raincoats. Mrs. Cunningham’s house was built in 1827 in the Tuscan style, a stucco Italian villa dropped into the middle of Alabama, complete with terra-cotta shingles on the roof and marble floors. That house and the 650 acres that surrounded it were the reasons I moved out there. I would have slept in a tool shed to live in its shadow. Burned now, blackened and crumbling in places, it looked like something from the ruins of ancient Rome.

  “She was in the house?” Charlotte whispered, tapping the window-pane. We couldn’t stop ourselves from whispering. She had come in a hurry and her hair was still mussed from sleeping and the pillow had drawn graceful lines on her face. I gave her a solemn nod.

  Mrs. Cunningham had lived alone in the big house, the sole occupant of its thirty-two rooms, and didn’t get out much, except to tend the garden. It was impossible to imagine Mrs. Cunningham as a young woman. My clearest memory was of her in the garden wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep off the sun and long baby blue formal gloves, the sort women used to wear to balls. To protect her skin, she said. Despite her age, her hair was still faintly red and the hat pushed brittle rings of it down around her face. Occasionally, she asked me to come over to the main house and help her move a piece of furniture or lift a heavy box down from the attic. Mrs. Cunningham believed that, because I taught at the college, I must therefore be an intellectual, so when I was finished with her heavy work, she would have a question ready for me, along with a glass of iced tea. How close did we—she said we, as if she were there—really come to securing foreign intervention in the Civil War? How did I think history would view George Wallace? Her tone was always serious so I told her whatever I knew on the subject, sometimes shamefully little. We never talked about ourselves.

  Around her, Shiloh was a different dog, docile but alert, curling at her feet beneath the kitchen table, growling if he thought I got too close. I think Mrs. Cunningham liked having a man on the property, but I may be flattering myself. My visits were infrequent. We rarely saw each other, though we lived not a hundred yards apart.

  My cottage was situated in a grove of maples, and Charlotte a
nd I would scare ourselves at night by pretending that the wind was slave voices singing old spirituals. We would sit under the dark trees and convince ourselves that we could almost make out the words. Neither of us believed in ghosts, so we weren’t really afraid, just thrilled, like children telling stories, and we would go rushing back inside and build a fire in the huge stone hearth and heap blankets on top of the bed. The fear, even make-believe, added something to our lovemaking. My cottage was really just one big room with a shotgun kitchen and a sleeping loft beneath a cathedral ceiling, that drew the dancing, ghostly shadows away from us, leaving the rest of the room in warm brown light, like the light from a dream. We would stay that way, breathless and delightfully alone, the covers thrown aside now, the sheets sticking to our backs, until we heard Mrs. Cunningham calling Shiloh in for the night, her voice rising and falling, holding on the “shy” a few beats, then dropping off on “low.” She would call maybe a dozen times, and we would hear her door close, and the house lights would begin to go off, one by one, leaving the yard in darkness.

  The night of the fire, we watched the firemen collecting their gear, rolling thick black hoses, sheathing extension ladders. When the last of the trucks had gone blinking sadly down the driveway, Charlotte said, “I think I wanna see it. Let’s examine the wreckage.” She was already heading for the door.

  “That’s not a good idea,” I said.

  “Why not?” she said. “Why are we whispering?”

  I didn’t have an answer for her right then, so I caught her by the belt and hauled her into my arms, hoping that maybe I could get her into my bed and keep her away from Mrs. Cunningham’s house. She took an imaginary pen and paper in her hands and read along as she wrote, “Dear Mr. College President, one of your professors, a certain Parson Price, has been making sexual advances toward me and I’m beginning to feel an uncomfortable pressure in class.” She twisted free of my embrace and was out the door, marching across the lawn toward the house before I could stop her. There was no stopping Charlotte once she set her mind.