The Do-Right

by Lisa Sandlin

  A squirrel spiraled around a tree and down. Laddy chased after him, barking to break the sound barrier, front legs straining onto the tree. The squirrel spurted up to a branch and leered, mixing its paws together like it was making evil plans.

  The barking continued full-throat until a woman in a housecoat stalked out into her yard next door to the client’s and screamed “Shuuuuu-ut up, you little shit!” Juanita Martin, Phelan presumed. The poisoner? She glowered while the squirrel retreated to a height Laddy considered unthreatening. The dog’s front feet hit ground. He wandered over to a flattened ball and tussled with it. No poison hamburger sailed over the fence that Phelan could see. The alleged poisoner, arms tightly folded, ducked past a hanging plant into her back door. After a while, Laddy stopped lipping the ball and went back to watching Phelan. Another hour passed. His first stakeout, this was it. Phelan cursed himself for not setting up, bringing a newspaper, a coke, that cold meatball sandwich pining away in his fridge.

  A mailman came along sorting envelopes. He shortened his stride and soft-footed it up to the porch’s mailbox. The growling dog pressed its face sideways to the chain link until the guy’s foot hit the porch, then he combined growling with wild barking and dancing. The postman slotted the mail. When he drew even with the dog, he feinted once, tantalizing Laddy from the safe zone on the sidewalk, and went on his way. The dog almost fell over backward barking. A door across the street flew open, and in it, a woman in curlers, her mouth moving. She was making some kind of pissed off voodoo signs toward his client’s yard.

  Phelan thought he had the story. Dog acts nuts all day, barks itself sick. Owner comes home. It throws up and collapses. End of case. Advice to owner, lagniappe: obedience school, give the dog a bedroom, take it to work. She was lucky nobody had tossed a grenade in her yard.

  He was about to start his car when a man with roostered hair, wearing white boxers with enough storage space for three butts, a T-shirt, and house slippers came out of the garage of the house in back of his client’s. He had a sack under his arm and was carrying a kid’s toy, one of those paddles with a ball on a string. He wasn’t alone. Tottering after him, one stiff step at a time like a wooden dog, was a gaunt, faded golden lab, its muzzle as white as Colonel Sanders’s goatee. The guy motioned. The dog sat.

  Being in underwear near a public street at eleven in the morning didn’t seem to bother the man. He plodded toward the client’s fence, where he set down the little brown sack. He hauled back the paddle and whapped the ball so that it zoomed into the terrier’s air space before rebounding. After a couple bobbles, he got a rhythm going.

  The terrier began leaping for the ball, snapping air, howling and yodeling until he matched the paddle’s rhythm. Up, down, up, down, snarl, bark, howl, a spit-spraying, ear-flapping, jack-in-the-box frenzy. The woman next door tore out of her house again, this time dressed in a pantsuit, a hairbrush in her hand. The electric-chair look on her face crimped into a mean smile.

  Hand over an ear, Phelan checked his watch. Three minutes, four. How’d the old guy keep it up? Boxer, maybe, once upon a time. Still had shoulders, though the bicep flesh was bouncing. Smack smack smack smack. Berserko dog freakout inside the fence. The old lab sat behind the man, head cocked, Tony Bennett taking in a Jerry Lee Lewis show.

  Laddy started missing the rhythm now and again. One jump instead of four. Finally the man in the underwear quit and massaged his batting arm. The hairy terrier collapsed, heaving, four legs splayed, like somebody had stepped on his back. Foam rimmed his mouth. The man bent down, skinny white legs bowing out, fly gaping, and snagged the paper sack. Phelan stepped out of the car.

  “’Scuse me, sir,” he said.

  The man pulled a marble out of the sack, leaned over the fence and drew a bead on Laddy’s panting head.

  “Sir,” Phelan said louder, jogging up to him.

  The man jumped. “What do you want?”

  “You planning to bean the dog?”

  The guy squinted, creasing the considerable bags under his eyes.

  “I said—”

  “Wait a minute.” He turned his head and pinched inside his ear to remove a plug. Then the other, dropped both earplugs in the T-shirt pocket. “Wasn’t for these sons a bitches I’d be dead. What’d you say?”

  Phelan smiled and introduced himself. “Your neighbor,” he hiked his chin toward Laddy’s owner’s house, “hired me to make sure nobody was hurting her dog.”

  “That’s not a dog. That’s a broke-dick yapping machine.”

  “Call the police on him for disturbing the peace?”

  “’Bout ten times. They don’t come anymore.” The man backhanded the air disgustedly.

  “I could sure understand it, but I don’t suppose you fed that dog anything dangerous?”

  “Dangerous.” The guy blinked crusty eyes at Phelan. “You mean rat poison. Strychnine. Arsenic. Insecticide. Cynanide.” He thought a second. “Brass tacks.”

  “Something like that,” Phelan said.

  “Naw, that’d be against the law. Which I know. I’m a security guard, work the eleven to seven. Listen, dogs are better’n people any day. Find a bad dog, you find a stupid, selfish bitch-face owner.”

  The man shot Phelan a sly glance, brought his hand up to his mouth and ate what was in it. Phelan imagined molars cracking on the marble. Ow. Going pretty far to prove a point. The old guy was wearing the same crimp-smile as Juanita Martin. He bent and fished out a couple more marbles, tossed them into his mouth.

  “Want some grapes? More in the sack.”

  Phelan commanded himself to maintain a professional attitude. Which, as far as he understood it—and he had understood it since he was ten—meant tough and knowing. Tough. Knowing. Couldn’t hold it—he laughed. Told the neighbor what he was going to recommend his client do: keep the dog in the house, send him to obedience school, etc., etc. “For the good of everybody, including the dog.”

  The man bent and fondled the neck of his mannerly lab, who craned to lick the guy’s whiskered jaw. “Yeah? I’ll believe it when I see it. This is a dog, by the way. Ain’t ya, old boy? I was gonna poison somebody, I’d poison her.” He stabbed toward the client’s house. “And I tell you just how I’d do it, too—”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  The man stared at him, nodded. “Good point.” He headed back to his garage, slippers slapping. The old dog followed him.

  Phelan squatted and examined the contents of the abandoned sack. No marbles, nails, capsules, or razor blades. Unripe-looking red grapes pulled off a stalk. He rolled them around, checked for needle sticks, none he could see. He sniffed one. Grape.

  Back at the office, Phelan gave Miss Wade his hours for the bill. His secretary left for a late lunch and when she got back, stuck her head in his office and said, “Grapes.”

  “What about ‘em?”

  “Them and raisins are bad for dogs’ kidneys. Don’t know how many it’d take to kill one, but a bag of grapes didn’t help Laddy out any.” She put her purse in a drawer and took out some typing paper.

  “You eat at the library, Miss Wade?”

  “They don’t notice, you sit at a back table and keep a sandwich under it.”

  At 5:20, Phelan called the client and gave her his report absolving Juanita Martin. Despite her pestering, he declined to reveal the identity of the neighbor whom he called “the chief complainant” and read out the two numbers of canine obedience schools listed in the Yellow Pages. Mentioned her other options. The client protested that Laddy was a sweet dog, and she didn’t need him to tell her different.

  Mindful of his fee, Phelan countered softly, “Ma’am. You ever eat at a nice restaurant and have somebody let their kids run all over the place, yelling and screaming and knocking into your chair?”

  “I sure have!” The client hated that and said so, anecdotally, for one and one half minutes.

  “Ma’am, Laddy’s that kid, and your neighbors are the people at the restaurant. You might just be the m
ost popular lady in the neighborhood if you were willing to fix the situation.”

  Silence. She offered grudgingly that she would think about it. “I don’t have to pay you for a whole day, do I?”

  “No, the bill will be for half plus expenses. That’s how long it took to…find out anybody within a hundred yards of your house was a suspect for dogacide…isolate the problem.”

  When the painter blocked out Phelan Investigations on his door, Phelan had envisioned complex, strung-out cases that took weeks. Good he had the Elliott one.

  XI

  DELPHA STEPPED DOWN onto the street. The bus door exhaled air behind her. A young guy with tangly hair, a rolled-sleeve shirt, and a deep lavender eye sat there on the bus bench. He held up a white rectangle. Around 10:30 at night, breathless hot, two people clattering by on the sidewalk, a car’s headlights.

  Her handkerchief was washed, ironed, folded. He dashed his top lip with the back of his hand. Sweat ran from Delpha’s temples.

  He followed her into the New Rosemont’s kitchen that smelled like Twenty Mule Team Borax and fifty years of bacon grease. Delpha waved toward a stool at the wood table Calinda Blanchard and Oscar the cook chopped on, got two Pearls from the icebox and popped their caps on the church key bolted to the wall. Streetlight from a parking lot, security light over the back kitchen door kept the room from being black dark. Delpha set down the bottles, one in front of Isaac, one across, then walked over to the counter behind his back. But she watched him.

  “Hey, thanks.” He fit his hands around the bottle and upturned it. Looked to drink most of it in one go.

  She smoothed out a five-dollar bill on the linoleum counter and slid the top edge of it under the corner of the big tin breadbox, where you could see the full Lincoln. Then she sat on the wooden stool, rolled the cold glass bottle to her cheek. After a while, she drank. Beer. She’d only missed it because she couldn’t have it.

  “How’s your nose?”

  “Sore. My doctor said it’d be OK. So, did you work both your jobs today—the office job and the old lady?”

  Mouth full, she nodded.

  “Long day. Why do you do it?”

  She swallowed. “Saving up.”

  “For what?”

  “Something I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  I want a life I want. “Don’t know yet.”

  He smiled. Straight teeth. “C’mon. Don’t you have an idea of what it might be?”

  “Something different than anything I had before.”

  “That’s cool. Saving up for a mystery.”

  “Don’t believe a person could be hell-bent on having something they don’t know what it is yet?”

  “I don’t know. But I know what I want.”

  “What?” She’d known one thing he wanted when she saw the ironed handkerchief.

  He looked away from her. “I want to be older, finished with college, making money—”

  “You gonna be older. There you go, your first wish’s granted now.”

  “Albert Einstein said there’s not any now. The past and the future and the present are all happening simultaneously. Linear time, hour after hour, day after day, it’s an illusion.”

  Delpha’s brow ruffled. “You believe that?”

  “Think it’s possible. And another scientist says that for one place in time there’re all these possible directions to go, and each one has a certain amplitude, and when added, the sum is zero—”

  “Lost you.”

  “OK, OK, wait. Our kind of time, one o’clock, two o’clock, summer, fall is just the most probable direction, the most probable path in space out of lots of other paths, the one the most people take.”

  “A path.”

  “Yeah.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Time’s a dimension.”

  “OK. So on one path, you lived this life. Or you could of took another road and lived in China.”

  “Or Africa or Chicago. If I had taken a less probable path.”

  “Well, there’s the deal, isn’t it? The scientist should have told us how you change paths. Plenty people would.”

  “I would. My mom keeps going on about how these years are precious, but I just want to rocket forward. Does that make sense?”

  “Wantin’ years to be minutes? Oh, yeah. I can understand that.”

  Very small smile. “I knew you could.”

  “Why?”

  “Just knew.” He couldn’t hold eye contact and chugged the last of his beer.

  The conversation stalled.

  Didn’t bother Delpha. In all her life to come, no matter how long or how short, there was no way sufficient quiet could accumulate to balance out the years of noise. The light fell on his face, bony now, the kind of face men grew into. She put stooped Isaac in a brick college, tie, hair trimmed up, touch of gray, professor like Dr. Einstein. Made him stand up straight. Gave him a tall blonde wife with glasses, kids.

  She got two more beers from the icebox. When she put down the bottles and sat, Isaac broke the silence. “Education is…was this huge deal to my parents. Man, talk about saving. By the time I was eight, they’d saved up my whole college tuition so I could go to anywhere.”

  “So, why aren’t you going anymore?”

  “Oh.” He looked down at the scarred wood table. “I will. Just not right now. My mom thinks she doesn’t need any help but she does.”

  “What’s your dad say?

  His lips mashed in. “My dad’s…he passed away.”

  “Oh. Sorry to hear about that. Boys need their dads.”

  He didn’t look up. “Girls too.”

  “That’s true. Just, boys that didn’t have a daddy, they’re either searchin’ or taking it out on a woman lotta their life.”

  “Oh, great.”

  Delpha pressed the barrel of cold bottle into her forehead and counted shit, shit, shit. She cleared her throat. “Know what. I can run off terrible at the mouth.”

  They sat there. He glanced up at her through his lashes, long lashes for a boy. “No, wait. Guys that didn’t have a dad, did they tell you that?”

  She shifted sideways on the stool so that she faced the refrigerator. “No, Isaac, and that’s what I mean. Bunch of women told me that.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. They sat. After a while his fingers tapped her forearm. “So, did you go to college?”

  She didn’t laugh. “No.”

  “Would you have liked to?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you have studied? I mean, like your major?”

  “When I know the answer to that, I’ll know what I’m saving money for. What are you studying?”

  “Science. The only other thing I ever liked as much was mythology.” He shook his head. “I was this dorky kid. Not the biggest Superman fan, surprisingly. Well, not true. Superman’s Return to Krypton was cool. But Theseus, Perseus, Dedalus, they’re major league. And Zeus and Thor. I wanted to hurl lightning on people.” A pause. “I sound five years old, right?”

  “Some people need lightning. Tell me ’bout your dad.”

  Isaac leaned his forehead between index and thumb, so that his fingers shaded his eyes. “He’s…He was”—huge, soft, helpless smile—“the best.” He sniffed and gave his head a couple of hard shakes.

  “Like how?”

  “We used to run. Sometimes jump the hurdles if they were left out on the track. He could still do that. Every night until he… We used to go canoeing up in the Big Thicket. In spring when the creeks were high. Know how many bugs live in the Big Thicket—like a million to the 10th power?—but Dad made this stuff we rubbed on our faces and hands and necks and we were fine. It’s peaceful in there on the bayous just gliding along. It’s like time travel. You don’t see anyone and it could be 1700 or it could be 600 B.C. Dad knew the name of a lot of the flora. Like Ilex Vomitoria”—Isaac grinned—“that one used to crack me up. Old vomitoria—it’s yaupon, and it can make you throw up…and, let’s see, Chinese tallow, that’s Sapiem sebife
rum and…did you ever go to the Thicket? You must have.”

  She angled herself around again, almost facing him. “Orchids, pitcher plant, loblolly, magnolia, holly, cypress slough, moss, willow, thick old vines like ropes. Don’t know those names you said. My mother and me lived the edge of the Thicket. I moved to Beaumont after she died.”

  “With your dad?”

  “He came round once. He wasn’t like your dad.”

  Isaac looked at her face for a while. “You should have had a dad like mine.”

  Delpha pushed her beer bottle over to clink the base of his.

  The lights snapped on. Isaac jumped off the wooden stool. Once Delpha stopped blinking against the glare, the scarecrow form of Calinda Blanchard appeared in roomy pajamas, gray hair rumpled. No eyeglasses, no teeth.

  “Ran outa aspirin. Got a new bottle in here.” The New Rosemont’s proprietor stretched out her corded neck and squinted toward the four brown beer bottles, then her gaze scraped fiercely up and down the length of Isaac, who’d clasped both hands over his crotch. She set a fist on her hip.

  “I have rules in my place.”

  “Under the breadbox, Miss Blanchard. Ain’t nobody mooching here.”

  Calinda stared at Delpha before slapping over to the counter on wide, bunioned feet. She pinched the five-dollar bill up in front of her nose, turned it over, made sure both sides were green. The pajamas had a breast pocket, Calinda tucked the five in there.

  She raked a glass off the shelf, filled it with tap water, took a little white bottle from a drawer and fiddled with its cap, muttering irritably. “I be dog.” Calinda made a threatening face at the bottle, then planted her bare feet and wrestled with the cap. She banged it on the counter several times. Brought it up close to her then, to glare it off.

  “You fool little punk piece of plastic, get offa here.”

  Isaac looked at Delpha, whose fingertip rose from the table.

  “I don’t know what they think they’re doing, making a aspirin bottle that doesn’t open less you’re a go-rilla—” Miss Blanchard gave it two more whacks against the counter.