“If it is Smokey,” Tyler says, “it didn’t bark like him.”
We approach from the rear and step onto the edge of the highway to see the front end. I say, “Does it look like him?”
“Yes and no,” says Tyler. “It does and it doesn’t. But it is.” His voice wrinkles up tight. “You and Dad promised me a dog.”
“For God’s sake, Tyler. Not a dead one.”
“Yesterday Smokey licked me in the mouth, Mom.”
He steps back, not from the dead dog, but from me. He’s embarrassed that he wants to move away from me. He puts his weight on the sides of his sneakers, running them over.
“Do you think this is something else I’ve caused to happen?”
“What I hate is you always know everything that happens before I do. I wish you weren’t an adult,” he says. His breath is short; he’s worried about telling me.
“You only blame me because I’m here,” I say. “If I were gone and your father were with you, you’d blame him. Why does somebody have to be to blame?”
Then he tells me very gently, “Oh, Mom, stop it. Don’t do that with your face. You look awful.”
I hurry inside the house, I know what he means. My face shows guilt. I will wash it. Run tap water, make a puddle in my hand, and sprinkle in the Health Beauty Grains that John Hunter gave me—I am not out of them yet! I scour my skin and the bad expression comes off. I am polished blank.
Back out, my boots slow me down—loose in spots, tight in others. “Help me go tell somebody about their dog,” I say. Tyler has made fists but they are hidden in his pockets. “Are you okay? If you’ll be okay, I’ll let you drive the car—I’m only kidding.” I pull the little blue car out of the carport while we discuss how to give bad news and Tyler shows me the way to Smokey’s home. I back carefully around his book bag. “We’ve got to pick that up,” I remind him.
It is easily walking distance but we ride around the corner of the subdivision and bump up the driveway to the carport, which looks just like ours. No one seems to be at home except a dog. “They have two of the same dogs!” I say.
“It’s okay, Mom, don’t worry,” Tyler says. “I can tell the difference.”
The big dog waits for me. When I get the car door open, she fishes at me with her tongue. I wish dogs had hands. “Shake, shake,” I say, hoping for a trick. I put my face to hers. “I’m glad people don’t look alike.” The dog kisses with her eyes open.
A young woman comes to the back door. She is out of focus behind the screen, but I recognize the look—low jeans, long hair, long shirt, like me. She comes out shoeless.
I go toward her, self-conscious of my boots because they hurt.
“Hi,” she says. My son and this woman know each other.
“This is my mom, LuAnn Wilson Hunter,” Tyler says. He gives her my whole name. “She has something to tell you.” I had warned him I’d better handle it so we wouldn’t upset anyone too much.
She looks moist like she’s been dipped. There is, not coy perfume, but an unsettling breath about her. I think she’s been making love to herself. “Hi,” she says again and apologizes for who she knows. “We rent, we don’t own, so I haven’t met the adults. I only know the kids in the neighborhood cause they come around to visit the dogs. I hear about the adults, though. I could invite you in, but things are in such a mess you probably couldn’t stand it. Wait, I could put all the extra dirty dishes in the oven.”
“No, no,” I answer twice. “Do you know where Smokey is?”
“Yes. Right behind you.”
“No. That’s your other dog.”
“Oh.” She comes out of the carport, and I think there are only two sides to her face. No front almost, as if she’d gotten it in tight places. But really it is only a very narrow face.
“I’ll call Smokey for you.”
“No, don’t,” I say. “I think we know where he is. He’s been hit on the highway at our house. We’re sorry.”
Quickly, she puts a finger in her mouth; I see her biting. I see all her nails are bitten raw. She catches herself with a sigh and takes her finger away and wipes it on her jeans. She stands on her cuffs. She’s not up to talking yet. She concentrates and nods. Tyler and I move closer, our shadows all running together. She’s feeling for the edge of a cuticle around what’s left of the nail. She gets hold and pulls. It comes up like a tiny apple peel, all in one piece; it is very satisfying. Then she bites it off like a thread. “I’m trying to grow long fingernails for my husband. Well,” she says, “he’s not really my husband.” She wipes her finger. “Is Smokey dead?”
“It happened in the dark this morning. I meant to say right away that he was dead.” The sun is in her hair. I hood my eyes with my hand. “We thought you would want him back. He needs to be buried.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “But he’s not really my dog. It’s not our house. The man who owns the house really owns the dogs. But I want to see if it’s Smokey.”
Now a slow-moving white cloud catches the sun and our shadows disappear.
Tyler gives her the directions back to our house and the dog: make one turn, that’s it.
“I’ll have to walk,” she says. “This guy I go with, he fixed my car.” The car is off the driveway on some flat grass.
“Did it have a wreck?” I ask. It has a bad paint job and a wrinkled side.
“Not this time,” she says. “He just wanted to work on it. So I spread out an old sheet and he took out the parts and laid them carefully on the sheet. Then he put everything back inside, except what wouldn’t fit. Now my car won’t work. He’s going to fix it again.”
“I’ll take you back in our car.”
The dog circles us. The woman walks slowly. I think we have to be careful of her feet. Her second toes are longer than her big toes, the nails look fragile as slips of waxed paper.
“You stay here,” she says to the dog, who does.
In the car, she sits forward in her seat. “Is he all messed up? Does he look bad? How does he look?”
“You can’t see how he died,” I say.
I feel like I’m on a long trip with this woman. I decide to put on my seat belt. Tyler has wedged into the back and hangs over the seat between us. He’s in the way when I try to see to back up. “All clear, Mom.” I listen to him.
She notices the Lifesavers that Tyler always keeps on the dash and asks, “Can I have one?”
“Tyler is saving his Lifesavers,” I say.
But Tyler doesn’t say anything. I know he’s been trying to suffer through all the yellows, oranges, and greens to keep the reds for last. She checks past the greens and yellows, plucks up a red, and carries it in her cheek. “I’m so scared, I am. I don’t like to see dogs dead.”
“Tyler? Are you still back there?” No sound. I ruffle my breath, irritated with him.
Something almost invisible hangs from my nose. I know it’s there and try to wave it off but I can’t find it. Perhaps it is the end of my still-attached hair. The woman puts her hand out and runs her fingers through the wind, but we are not going fast. Whose hair is it? Perhaps she is shedding.
Now we bump back up our driveway and pull into the identical carport, except for the book bag on the cement. I get out and pick up the bag. Tyler’s homework is hot.
When she doesn’t get out, Tyler squeezes out from behind her.
“It’s him,” she says, looking past us. She has identified him by seeing his balls out between his hind legs. That’s what I can see from here.
I’m slumped down in my jeans. I pull myself up. “What’s your name?” I ask.
“Ms. Parks,” she answers softly, as if she’s unsure it’s her own name or an alias.
“Mine’s LuAnn,” I say, reintroducing myself. My voice is shaking because I’m going to ask this woman with no face to get out and help me pick up a dead dog.
Maybe I didn’t ask out loud because she doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s listening to the ringing in her own ears because she looks worse.
“Look,” I say for real, “it’s not my dead dog.”
“It’s not mine! Really. It’s not mine,” she replies. Then she says, “Oh!” suddenly as if a finger of vomit had come up her throat.
“Look,” I say. “The dog has to be buried. I’ve got to put Tyler’s homework on the table, so first let’s go inside and get cool.”
She’s lean and young but she gets out like she’s broken. I can’t touch her, the ends of her fingers are so chewed.
Tyler helps her. After that, I see that he dries his hands secretly in his pockets.
She comes in and sits pulled-up at our small round table where we just fit. My son straddles his chair. I sit sideways because I’m the server. Her long hair crouches on her shoulders. I serve my son’s purple Kool-Aid. The Kool-Aid tastes funny to me.
“Thank you,” says Ms. Parks with a purple top lip. “In all these years I’ve never learned to drink coffee. But I’m still trying. This guy I live with . . . you know what?”
“Probably,” I say. “But go ahead and tell me anyway.”
“Well, sometimes he takes his car and goes away for a while, like now. So when he comes back I say, ‘I missed you so.’ But then I go blank. Looking at him, I can’t tell exactly what I do miss.” She laughs her eyes shut, and blue shows through her thin lids.
I press the heel of my hand against where I think my heart is. Tyler says in his flat voice, “You have to keep seeing somebody or they do forget you.” We all think about this a minute. When there’s nothing left of the Kool-Aid but colored rings at the bottom of the tumblers, Tyler reaches for the ring in his with his tongue.
Ms. Parks stands up with nowhere to go. “I’d like to see your house,” she says. “It’s just like mine, but different. I like your little piles of things, your collections.”
“I haven’t unpacked,” I lie. What I have been doing is putting all the things I love together to hide them so nobody can find them. Including me. I’m taking them up that thin, collapsible ladder to the dry air of the attic. I mean pictures, books, notes, little carvings, drawings, shells, a stone collection. I’m afraid someone will notice them and ask me about them. I don’t want to tell about them. I’m afraid I’ll remember too well and break them. All but my house-plants. I was so afraid they wouldn’t fit in the car for the leaving. But right now a huge armored cactus sits at my bedroom mirror and refuses to bloom or die, a tall avocado at the glass-paned back door drops leaves with a whisper, and my braided ficus tree that sat in a pot by my other door sits by this one. They lived through it.
“A tree in a pot,” she says. She doesn’t know its name.
“Please,” I say, “don’t fuss with it. It rode two days braced in the car.”
She gives it a serious nod. “Yes.”
The sepia-colored house air breaks up with a little sunlight. It’s on her chair. She sits in it. “People in this neighborhood,” she says, “don’t love things. They don’t love their work or their vacations, or their other husbands and wives they’ve had.” She crosses her arms. Her top button is gone. “They don’t even like any of the presents they get. It’s never the right present. They keep a pet in a fence—without companionship of man or other beast. And they keep their grass too short.” Her hands with her bloody, raw cuticles slide down her long, long hair. “I run with the dogs,” she says.
“I don’t really live inside the subdivision,” I say. “I’m on the highway.”
Over the tops of the cafe curtains, only branches and leaves show. She looks out catty-corner. “You can’t see my house from here,” she says. “You have too many leaves.” Water oaks take a long time to lose their leaves. Only the top leaves have been turning yellow. “But as soon as they fall,” she says, “you need one hard, wet rain, then you’ll be able to see my house.”
I curl my unbroken boots tightly around the legs of my chair.
Tyler has picked up one of the small gifts his father sends him by mail. Little toys with fluorescent stickers on them saying “Reduced item.” It worries him that his father has started sending toys too young for him. Secretly he doesn’t want the gift. He tries to play with it, but a part pops away from him and rolls like a dime, ringing, under the table. I hear his foot slap it still.
Ms. Parks, agitated, bites a finger and warns him sideways from her eyes. “Some things won’t even stand up to normal use.”
I salt my voice to remind them. “There is this question of the dog. Let me go put him in the car.”
They let me.
Outside, I open an old newspaper to cover the spot where I’ll lay him. I read the old spread-out paper, trying to decide to ask for help again. As my former husband says, I choose to be all alone and then I need help. My self-inflicted divorce, he calls it.
I have tunnel vision now; my eyelashes get in the way of my eyes. Tyler is not in my tunnel. I cross my yard in a tight walk and kneel beside Smokey. This is not the way things should end. My face feels hot with the pressure of my own blood. John Hunter had said, “I’ve got us in a hot spot. Feel it? But you have to stay with me now because I don’t know how to get out.” Trouble. He wanted to jump out of the car, eat a razor blade, throw his “calm” pills all over the room. He was far more fragile than I.
I slide my hands beneath Smokey. To steady myself, I dig down, the dirt rich beneath my nails. I feel like I’m hanging onto my yard. There are crystals of sweat under my arms. This dog is heavy. I have him up and now I know he is mine. I rest him against the thin padding I wear.
Inside I am strumming. Numbers are vibrating in my head. I’m counting each careful move I make. John would say, “Your love is great, but it lights on the wrong things.” All of this doesn’t hurt so much for his saying it as it hurts for my knowing it might be true.
The suction of the highway is dangerous. I try to get my balance. Last year I was driving alone, reading maps on the seat beside me in a hurry to borrow money. John had lost his job. Depressed, unable to move, he couldn’t even get dressed. He said if I got a job my salary wouldn’t be enough to help us. I needed to get to those addresses and ask for a loan. I was shy; this was hard. But John was brokenhearted. He didn’t want a new job, he wanted the old one he loved back.
I think what happened was I was following the lead of someone in shock. My staying with him made it worse. John had too much hope, he believed in the unbelievable—that money would arrive in the mail from those people. We tried to stay together. Out for fresh air to break his depression, he said, “I’m going to jump in front of the mail truck.” He was a great kidder, but I kept a hand on the tail of his jacket, walking him like a dog. We had failed each other.
It was his love for Tyler that saved him; he wouldn’t let Tyler see him kill himself. During those months that he baffled himself with our problems, he was saying, “Well, we’ve got Tyler.” So I kept Tyler with us all the time.
But then I did leave. I teach remedial subjects now on call for the high school.
My nose feels stuffed with thick cloth. The breath I draw up from my tight lungs is hot as a hemorrhage. “I have taken Tyler,” I say. I try to breathe and cross my yard at the same time. “I never meant to take him away. But only separated—separated—separated—are we all safe?” I whisper the words to make them true. I stumble over my unevenly cut grass, carrying what I have picked up. I remember our leaving, the car low and loaded, plant branches pressed against the windows. He broke our cool plan and began running awkwardly toward us. Tyler had to scoop down and throw pine cones at him to keep him away so we could leave each other.
My arms hurt. Through the thick black fur, Smokey is cold, stiff, and very breakable. The nerves in my cheeks dance with my fire.
The dog doesn’t lie right on the newspaper. I have disturbed the print of his death. I see the blood now, dark as old lipstick. I am dry; I do not cry.
Tyler is in the middle of the back seat again. I put down the hatch with a jolt and join them. When the car goes in reverse, Ms. Parks looks back with
me. I glare at her but she watches with me at the turn, too. I wish she wouldn’t. Her car is bashed in. Whether she did it or not, I don’t want to hear when-to-go from anyone with a bashed-in car.
Pressing the accelerator breaks my toes. A bad feeling spreads to a double eye-ache. I want to change my shoes, get back into my old ones. Then I remember I threw them out so I couldn’t wear them anymore. I’ve ruined myself in the wrong shoes.
Ms. Parks, with no face, has her ear in the wind. A hair swivels in front of me again. Then I can’t see it and I think the hair is in my throat. A long rippling gag stumbles around my mouth.
“Are you all right?” Ms. Parks asks, ready to help.
“Damn it! Damn it!”
“Mom.” Tyler is digging around, trying to pat my back.
“Leave me alone,” I say. “I’m an adult. Surely I can swallow one hair.”
Nearer the bottom of her driveway, the yard looks older and full of natural mounds and dips. I stop there. We get out on the runner of concrete. At the back, I lift the hatch and take Smokey off the newspaper and put him down on his grass. The other dog has been waiting in a nap. Now she stretches, moves her head side to side to focus, and growls. Edgy, she lopes toward Smokey, her fur lifting along her spine the wrong way. She comes to Ms. Parks and anxiously sticks out her tongue.
My boots hurt and a pulse runs across my face.
We move quickly. The sun is slipping. The grass is the color of sage. Ms. Parks brings a shovel sharp as a knife. I look at the two of them and choose myself to do it. I lift a lid in the hard woven grass. A surprise: underneath the topsoil looks like the night sky, cool and deep and glittering with mica. Now I dig. It is not easy. Past the top-soil into the loose scree and mantle, the shovel noses small broken plates of clay. Tyler is with me, a flicker of white sneaker toes.
The she-dog pounds up and down the yard.
Something clicks—an insect or a bird beak. Tyler starts the Pledge of Allegiance and then gets the right memorized words for “Our Father.” I sigh and wonder if I am an unbeliever. Between my eyelids, I peek at them. Ms. Parks tucks her face under. Will she cry or vomit? I am surprised. She prays to God knows who.
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