Dog Tales

by Jack Dann

  “Right. Look, doll, I’m forty-nine. And laid off. You know what the story is for the other guys who’ve had this happen. No luck. No job. Nothing. It wouldn’t be any different with me, honey. You have to accept that.”

  She kissed his nose and stood up, hands on hips, studying him. “You! You’re better than all the others put together. You know you are. You told me yourself a hundred times.”

  “Honey, I’m forty-nine. No one hires men who are forty-nine.”

  “Martin, stop this! I won’t have it. You’re a young man. Educated! My God, you’ve got degrees nobody ever even heard of. You’ve got education you’ve never even used yet.”

  He laughed and poured his second martini. She knew it pleased him for her to get indignant on his behalf. “I know what I’m talking about, honey. Simmer down, and listen. Okay?” She sat down again, on a stool on the other side of the bar, facing him. A tight feeling had come across her stomach, like the feeling she used to get just before the roller coaster started to go down the last, wildest drop. “I don’t want another job, Rose. I’ve had it with jobs. I want to buy a farm.”

  She stared at him. He said it again. “We could do it, honey. We could sell the house and with the money left after we pay off the mortgage, the car, the other things, there’d be enough for a small farm. Ten, twenty acres. Not on the coast. Inland. West Virginia. Or Kentucky. I could get a job teaching. I wouldn’t mind that.”

  “Martin? Martin! Stop. It’s not funny. It isn’t funny at all. Don’t go on like this.” Her playfulness evaporated, leaving only the tight feeling.

  “You bet your sweet ass it isn’t funny. And I’m serious, Rose. Dead serious.”

  “A farm! What on earth would I do on the farm? What about the kids?”

  “We can work out all those things . . .”

  “Not now, Martin. I have to go get Juliette. Later, later.” She ran into the house without looking back at him. Bad strategy, she thought at herself dressing. She should have gone to bed with him, and then talked him out of his crazy notion. That’s all it was, a crazy notion. He was as scared as she was. He could get a job in Jacksonville. He could. It wasn’t a bad drive. He could come home weekends, if he didn’t want to drive it every day, although some people did. She thought about the house payments, and the insurance, and the pool maintenance, and the yard people, and the housecleaning woman who came twice a week. And the lessons: piano, ballet, scuba, sailing. The clubs. The marina where they left the ketch. She thought of her dressmaker and her hairdresser, and his tailor, and the special shoes for Annamarie, and the kennel fees when they went away for the weekend and had to leave the three toy poodles. She thought of two thousand dollars’ worth of braces for Juliette in another two years.

  She thought about the others it had happened to. Out of six close friends only one, Burdorf, had another job, advisor to an ad agency. But Burdorf had an in with them; his wife’s father owned it.

  Rose Ellen tried to stop thinking of the others who had been laid off. But Martin was different, she thought again. Really different. He had so many degrees, for one thing. She shook her head. That didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered for any of the others.

  She thought about being without him. She and the children without him. She shivered and hugged herself hard. She could go to work. She hadn’t because neither of them had wanted her to before. But she could. She could teach, actually, easier than Martin could. He didn’t have any of the education courses that were required now. So, she pursued it further, she would teach, at about seven thousand a year, and Martin would have to pay, oh, say four hundred a month . . . And if he didn’t, or couldn’t? If he was on a farm somewhere without any money at all? Seven thousand. Braces, two thousand. House, two thousand. Some extras, not many, but some, like a car. In another year Annamarie would be driving, and junior insurance, and then Jeffrey would be wanting a car . . .

  More important, they wouldn’t mind her. She knew it. Martin could control them with a word, a glower. She was easy and soft with them. It had always been impossible to tell them no, to tell them she wouldn’t take them here or there, do this or that for them. They’d run all over her, she knew.

  ###

  Martin bought a farm in May and they moved as soon as school was out. The farm was twelve acres, with a small orchard and a deep well and barn. The house was modern and good, and the children, surprisingly, accepted the move unquestioningly and even liked it all. They held a family council the day after moving into the house and took a vote on whether to buy a pool table for the basement rec room, or a horse. It would be the only luxury they could afford for a long time. Only Rose Ellen voted for the pool table.

  Martin had to take three courses at the university in the fall semester, then he would teach, starting in mid-term, not his own field of mathematics, because they had a very good teacher already, he was told, but if he could brush up on high school general science . . .

  Rose Ellen signed up as a substitute teacher for the fall semester. The school was only a mile and a half from their house; she could walk there when the weather was pleasant.

  “It’s going to be all right, honey,” Martin said one night in early September. Everyone had started school, the whole move to the country had been so without trauma that it was suspicious. Rose Ellen nodded, staring at him. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Dirt on my face?”

  “No. It’s strange how much you looked like my father there for a moment. A passing expression, there and gone so fast that I probably imagined it.”

  “Your father?”

  She picked up the magazine she had been looking at. “Yes. I told you I couldn’t remember him because I didn’t want to talk about him. It was a lie. He didn’t die until I was eleven.

  Martin didn’t say anything, and reluctantly she lowered the magazine again. “I’m sorry. But after I told you that, back in the beginning, I was stuck with it. I’m glad it came out finally.”

  “Do you want to talk about him?”

  “No. Not really. He drank a lot. He and mother fought like animals most of the time. Then he died in a car accident. Drunk driving, hit a truck head-on, killed himself, nearly killed the driver of the truck. Period. When I was fourteen she married again, and this time it was to a rich man.”

  “Did she love Eddie?”

  “Eddie was the practical one,” Rose Ellen said. “She married for love the first time, for practical reasons the second time. The second one was better. They’ve been peaceful together. No more fights. No more dodging bill collectors. Like that.”

  “Did she love him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it didn’t matter.”

  Martin didn’t say any more, and she wondered about her mother and her second husband. Had it mattered? She didn’t know. She turned pages of the magazine without looking at them, and Martin’s voice startled her.

  “Sometimes I think we should fight now and then,” he said. “I wonder sometimes what all you’re bottling up.”

  “Me? You know we discuss everything.”

  “Discuss isn’t what I mean. We discuss only after you get quiet and stay quiet long enough to come to a decision. I’d like to know sometimes what all goes on in that head of yours while you’re in the process of deciding.”

  She laughed and stood up. “Right now all that’s in my head is the fact that I want a bath and bed.”

  She was at the door to the kitchen when Martin asked, “What did your father do?”

  She stopped. Without turning around again she said, “He had a small farm. Nothing else.”

  She soaked for a while and thought about his words. It was true that they never fought. He hadn’t lived with two people who did fight, or he’d never say anything like that. She knew it was better to be civilized and give in. She was a good wife, she told herself soberly. A good wife. And she was adaptable. He had taken her from Atlanta to Florida, from there to Kentucky. So be it. She could get along no matter where they lived, or what they di
d. One of them had to, she said sharply in her mind. She had been a silent observer in her own house, then in her stepfather’s house for years. It was better that way. She let the water out and rubbed herself briskly. At the bathroom door she saw that Martin had come up; their light was on. She paused for a few seconds, then went downstairs to read. She had been more tired than sleepy, she decided. Actually it was quite early.

  ###

  October was still days of gold and red light, of blue skies that were endlessly deep, of russet leaves underfoot and flaming maples and scarlet poison ivy and sumac, yellow poplars and ash trees. She walked home from school with a shopping bag under her arm, alone on the narrow road that was seldom used, except by the half-dozen families that lived along it. Here one side was bordered by a fence line long grown up with blackberries and boysenberries and inhabited by small scurrying things that were invisible. The other side had a woods, not very dense, then a field of corn that had been harvested so that only skeletons remained. Behind the fence line was a pasture with a stream, peaceful cows that never once looked up as she passed them. The pasture ended, a stand of pine trees came up to the road. Then there was an outcropping of limestone and a hill with oak trees and some tall firs, and walnut trees. Walnuts had dropped over the road, along both sides of it.

  She stopped at the walnuts and began to gather the heavy green hulls, hardly even broken by the fall. They would have to spread them out, let them dry. A scene from her childhood came to her, surprising her. There were so few scenes from her early years that sometimes she worried about it. They had gathered nuts one day. She, her mother, her father, out along a dirt road near their farm, gathering hickory nuts, and butternuts. They had taken a lunch with them, and had eaten it by a stream, and she had waded, although the water had been icy. Her father had made a fire and she had warmed her feet at it. She saw again his smiling face looking up at her as he rubbed her cold toes between his warm hands.

  She finished filling her bag and picked up her purse again. Then she saw the dogs. Two of them stood on the other side of the road, behind the single strand of wire that was a fence. They were silver, and long-legged, and very beautiful. They were as motionless as statues. She moved and their eyes followed her; they remained motionless. Their eyes were large, like deer eyes, and golden. She turned to look at them again after passing them; they were watching her.

  That night she tried to describe them to Martin. “Hunting dogs, I’d guess,” she said. “But I’ve never seen any like them before. They were as skinny as possible to still have enough muscles to stand up with. All long muscles and bones, and that amazing silver hair.”

  Martin was polite, but not really interested, and she became silent about them. The children were upstairs in their rooms, studying. She realized that she saw very little of them anymore. They had adapted so well that they were busy most of the time, and the school days here were longer, the buses were later than they used to be, so that they didn’t get home until four-fifteen. Then there were the things that teenagers always did: telephone; records; riding the horse, currying it, feeding it; Jeffrey out on his bike with other boys . . . She sighed and began to look over the papers she had brought home to grade. She would have Miss Witner’s fifth-grade class for another week. She decided that she detested geography.

  The next afternoon the dogs were there again; this time they left the field as she came near, and stood just off the road while she passed them. She spoke to them in what she hoped was a soothing voice, but they seemed not to hear; they merely stared at hen

  They were bigger than she had remembered. Their tails were like silver plumes, responding to the gentle breeze as delicately as strands of silk. Feathery silver hair stirred on their chests and on the backs of their long, thin legs.

  She slowed down, but continued to walk evenly until she was past them, then she looked back; they were watching her.

  Her father had had a hound dog, she remembered suddenly. And her mother had let it loose one day. They never had found it. Sometimes at night she had thought she could hear its strange voice from the hills. It had a broken howl that distinguished it from the other hounds. It started high, rose and rose, then broke and started again on a different key.

  She never had wondered why her mother let it go, but now she did. How furious her father had been. They had screamed at each other for hours, and just as suddenly they had been laughing at each other, and that had been all of the scene. She realized that they had gone to bed, that they always had gone to bed after one of their fights. Everything they had done together had been like that, fierce, wild, uninhibited, thorough. And now her mother was growing old in Eddie’s fine house, with no one to yell at, no one to yell at her. No one to make up with. Rose Ellen resisted the impulse to look back at the dogs. She knew they would be watching her. She didn’t want to see them watching her again.

  The next day was Friday and she left school later than usual, after a short staff meeting about a football game. As a substitute she didn’t have to attend the meeting, and certainly she wasn’t required to go to the game, but she thought she might. If Jeffrey wanted to go, she would take him. Maybe they would all go. The sun was low and the afternoon was cooler than it had been all week. She walked fast, then stopped. The dogs were there. Suddenly she was terrified. And she felt stupid. They were polite, well-behaved dogs, very valuable from the looks of them. They must belong to John Renfrew. They were always at his property line anyway. She wondered if he knew they were loose. Or were they so well trained that they wouldn’t leave his property? She started to move ahead again, but slowly. When she got even with them, they moved too. Not at her side, but a step behind her. She stopped and they stopped and looked at her.

  “Scat,” she said. “Go home.” They stared at her. “Go on home!” She felt a mounting fear and shook it off with annoyance. They weren’t menacing or frightening, not growling, or making any threatening movement at all. They were merely dumb. She pointed toward John Renfrew’s field again. “Go home!” They watched her.

  She started to walk again, and they accompanied her home. She couldn’t make them go back, or stop, or sit, or anything. No matter what she said, they simply looked at her. She wondered if they were deaf and mute, and decided that she was being silly now. They would have followed her inside the house if she hadn’t closed the door before they could.

  “Martin!” The three champagne-colored poodles were ecstatic over her return. They jumped on her, and pranced, and got in the way, yapping. She hadn’t noticed the car, but he could have put it in the garage, she thought, looking in the study, the kitchen, opening the basement door, stepping over poodles automatically. No one else was home yet. She looked out the window. They were sitting on the porch, waiting for her. She pulled back and found that she was shivering.

  “This is ridiculous!” she said. “They are dogs!” She looked up Renfrew’s number and called him. His wife answered.

  “Who? Oh, yes. I’ve been meaning to come over there, but we’ve been so busy. You understand.”

  “Yes. Yes. But I’m afraid your dogs followed me home today. I tried to make them go back, but they wouldn’t.”

  “Dogs? You mean Lucky? I thought I saw him a minute ago. Yes, he’s here. I can see him out in the yard.”

  “These are hunting dogs. They are silver-colored, long tails . . .”

  “Our Lucky is a Border collie. Black and white. And he’s home. I don’t know whose dogs you have, but not ours. We don’t have any hunting dogs.”

  Rose Ellen hung up. She knew they were still there. The back door slammed and Jeffrey and Annamarie were home. Presently Juliette would be there, and Martin would be back, and they could all decide what to do about the dogs on the porch. Rose Ellen went to the kitchen, ready to make sandwiches, or start dinner, or anything. She felt a grim satisfaction that she had successfully resisted looking at the dogs again. Let them wait, she thought.

  “Hi, kids. Hungry?”

  “Hi, Mom. Can I stay o
ver at Jennifer’s house tonight? She’s a drum majorette and has to go to the game, and I thought I might go too, with Frank and Sue Cox, and then go to Jennifer’s house for hamburgers and cokes after?”

  Rose Ellen blinked at Annamarie. “I suppose so,” she said. Jennifer was the daughter of the principal. She marveled at how quickly children made friends.

  “I have to run, then,” Annamarie said. “I have to get some pants on, and my heavy sweater. Do you think I’ll need a jacket? Did you hear the weather? How cold will it get?” But she was running upstairs as she talked, and out of earshot already.

  “Well, how about you?” Rose Ellen said to Jeffrey. “You going to the game too?”

  “Yeah. We’re ushers. That’s our chore, you know. This month we do that, then we sell candy at the basketball games after Christmas. Is it okay if I have a hot dog and go? I told Mike I’d meet him at his house, and we’ll catch the bus there.”

  Rose Ellen nodded. Martin and Juliette came home together then. He had picked her up at the bus stop.

  They had dinner, and Juliette vanished to make one of her interminable phone calls to Betsy, her all-time closest friend. Rose Ellen told Martin about the dogs. “They’re out on the porch,” she said. “I’m sure they’re very expensive. No collars.”

  With the three toy poodles dancing around him, Martin went to the door to look. The hounds walked in when the door opened. The poodles drew back in alarm; they sniffed the big dogs, and then ignored them. Rose Ellen felt tight in her stomach. The silly poodles were always panicked by another dog.

  “Good God,” Martin said. “They’re beautiful!” He clicked his fingers and called softly, “Come on, boy. Come here.” The dogs seemed oblivious of him. They looked at Rose Ellen. Martin walked around them, then reached down tentatively and put his hand on the nearer one’s head. The dog didn’t move. He ran his hand over the shoulders, down the flank, down the leg. The dog didn’t seem to notice. Martin felt both dogs the same way. He ran his hand over the shoulders, down the lean sides of the dogs, over their bellies, again and again. A strange look came over his face and abruptly he pulled away. “Have you felt them?”