by Maggie Estep
As I sat considering whether or not to go back to bed, the doorbell rang. I went to the window to look down and saw my mother standing on my stoop with a massive brown pit bull at her side.
“Mom,” I called down through the window. “What is it?”
My mother lives a hundred miles north of New York City, in Woodstock, where she has a little wooden house and two acres on which she keeps rescued dogs that she tries to find homes for. Whenever she encounters a dog she doesn’t have room for, she turns up on my doorstep, unannounced, expecting me to foster the dog in question.
“I have a present for you, sweetheart.” My mother was craning her neck and her still-youngish face looked exuberant, like a little kid who has just played a prank on her elders.
“Indio is dead,” I said.
“What?” My mother screwed her face up.
“Indio fell off a bridge and died.”
As my mother struggled with this information, one of my downstairs neighbors, Jeff, opened his window and looked up at me.
“Eloise, you’re not taking that monstrous dog into your apartment. It will kill you and eat your flesh.”
“Yes, Jeff, I know,” I said.
Jeff likes to think about things like my being devoured by wild dogs. Maybe this is why I find him attractive.
“Just come on up, Mom,” I said. I pulled my head back out of the window and hit the buzzer, opening the down- stairs door.
“You’re not serious about Indio,” my mother said as she came into my apartment, gently tugging on the massive brown dog’s leash. The pit bull seemed hesitant to cross my threshold. Looked timidly from my mother to me and, after much encouragement, finally came in.
“Yes. He’s dead. I had to identify his body,” I said without emotion.
“Oh Eloise.” My mother dropped the beast’s leash and threw her arms around me. I felt myself stiffen.
My mother gave up on trying to get me to surrender to the hug and sat down on the bed. The pit bull looked around nervously, waiting for a cue from Mom, who patted the bed, indicating the dog should jump up there.
“Mom, I don’t even like dogs.”
“Eloise, tell me about Indio,” my mother said, willfully ignoring my statement. “How did this happen, when did you find out?”
I gave her the facts.
“I don’t like dogs, Mom,” I reiterated when I’d finished telling her about Indio. “I appreciate what you do to save them but I’m tired of taking dogs in.”
“Eloise, you’re shut down. You’ve just experienced something incredibly painful. You need to talk about it.”
My mother’s face was so earnest. So lovely. Her olive skin clear and free of wrinkles. Her wild, curly black hair flying all around. At fifty-three, she is twenty-four years older than me but could pass for my older sister. She has led an unconventional life and it has agreed with her.
“Oh, Mom,” I said. “I can’t talk about it. Do you want some coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
I trudged over to the kitchen area where Hammie was perched on the counter, looking extremely upset about the presence of a dog.
“Did you tell Alice?” my mother called out.
“This just happened this morning.”
“I wish you two were closer,” my mother said.
“It’s not a lack of closeness. I haven’t had time to call my sister. I literally just got back from the morgue when you turned up on my doorstep with a pit bull.” I motioned at the beast tentatively wagging its tail.
“Having experienced death today, surely you can understand why I could not leave Turbo to die. She was scheduled for the gas chamber tomorrow.”
“Mom, you’re guilt tripping me when my lover has just died?”
“I’m sorry.” My mother actually hung her head.
It took forty-five minutes to convince my mother I was all right and get her to leave me in peace. Of course, I had to agree to foster Turbo. And now, Turbo and I were staring at each other. I hadn’t wanted to admit it in front of my mother, but I thought that this solid brown dog with a shady past might help keep the ghosts at bay.
“Hello, Turbo,” I said as I sat at the kitchen table, sipping another cup of coffee. She tilted her big, square head and appeared to smile. She couldn’t have actually known her name since it had just been assigned to her at the shelter. She was simply responding to the sound of my voice. She seemed to like me, but then again, she would have probably liked anyone who showed her kindness.
A week after Indio’s death, I tried getting back to work. Not that I have to work. I’m rich, or at least rich by my standards, having gone from dirt poor to 1.2 million just about overnight when I fell in that manhole, crushed my pelvis, stayed in a coma for two weeks, and came out of it to find an ambulance-chaser lawyer with a comb-over sitting vigil at my bedside. It was a big case for him, actually winning and getting all that money out of the city. And, as I mourned the fact that the city I love had literally tried to devour me by sucking me down into its entrails and crushing my pelvis, the doctors and surgeons pieced me back together. I can walk, but I have a hitch in my step from one leg being shorter than the other. And I’m extremely wary of movable things in the streets and sidewalks.
But as a result of that money, I don’t have to work. Yet I do. I’ve had my own small business since the age of sixteen when I started making unconventional stuffed animals. Mythical beasts with enormous heads, tiny bodies, and long, snaking tails. Sometimes they have the heads of dogs and the bodies of rats. Other times they are part giraffe. Still others are entirely unrecognizable except as things I’ve seen in my dreams. I love my beasts and it’s a heartbreak each time I finish one and have to put it into the closet where I store all the finished animals that I’ll eventually distribute to the toy stores that carry my work. Now that I have money, I could just hoard them all until I’ve spent every last dime. But that wouldn’t be right either. I make my beasts so they can go out into the world.
I had just started making drawings for a giant cockroach with a dog’s head. But my heart wasn’t in it. In fact, I wasn’t sure I had a heart. Since Indio’s death, I had felt nothing other than swells of affection for Turbo, whose sweetness and willingness were hard to ignore.
“Do you want to walk?” I asked Turbo.
Her language skills were improving. She now understood “Walk,” “Food,” “No Kitty,” and “Sit.” “Walk” was her favorite. She got up off her dog bed, spun around in two quick circles, then sat and grinned up at me, exposing her pink gums and the tip of her tongue.
Turbo bounded down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. She trotted proudly at my side. The first week she’d been with me, she’d alternated between pulling wildly and stopping dead in her tracks, staring all around at this world that by turns amazed and frightened her. Now she had some confidence. She was a dog who believed in something.
We walked then walked some more. Turbo was enthusiastic about each new block, each garbage can that needed sniffing, each person or dog we passed, most of them ignoring her grinning face and wagging tail, some going so far as to cross the street. I liked this about her. That she looked like a monster but was filled with love for everything.
We wandered all the way to Central Park and, since Turbo was still full of beans, we entered. Darkness was falling, the budding trees throwing shadows, but it’s not like I was worried with the powerful brown beast at my side. I doubted she would actually attack someone coming after me, but her looks alone would give any would-be thugs pause.
We had ambled all the way down to the boathouse and were following a nice, well-lit path, when I somehow tripped over a tree root, went sprawling, and landed face first.
I wanted to wail. I’m ridiculously accident-prone but I hadn’t actually banged into anything or fallen off a sidewalk in well over a week and thought maybe this was due to the death of Indio, that this was a big enough dose of emotional pain to ward off any physical stumbles.
As I lay
there, feeling my face stinging and my lip throbbing, Turbo put her muzzle next to my mouth and tried to lick the blood pouring out of my lip.
I gently pushed her back.
“That looks awful,” a voice said.
I glanced up to find a lanky, fair-haired guy standing there. As I blinked up at him, he squatted down and reached over to touch my face. I stared at him, transfixed. Turbo looked from the guy to me and back, waiting for a signal in case I needed protection.
“It’s okay, Turbo,” I said, though I wasn’t sure that it was.
“You’re going to need stitches. Your lip is bleeding. Here.”
The stranger produced a handkerchief from a pocket. A genuine handkerchief. I hadn’t seen one since my Grandpa Edgar had died in 1987.
“You have a handkerchief?” I asked as I held said handkerchief to my lip, soaking it with blood.
“A gentleman always has a handkerchief,” he replied. “What happened to you?”
“I tripped on a branch. I’m very clumsy,” I said. “And unlucky. My half-sister earns a living as a professional gambler. She got all the luck in our family. My mother and I are clumsy losers.” I was babbling, as I often do right after an accident. The day I came to after my manhole coma, they couldn’t shut me up.
“Oh?” the guy tilted his head.
He was big and attractive. Or maybe I was just dazed and susceptible.
“Can I help you to the hospital?” he asked.
“I’d prefer not to.”
“Prefer not to what?”
“Prefer not to go to the hospital. They’re all crazy.”
“Hospitals or the medical profession?”
“Both,” I said.
He smiled. He was missing a front tooth. It was incongruous. He was well-dressed, apparently solvent and healthy, yet missing a front tooth. I stared at the space in his mouth as he helped me to my feet.
“As much as it may pain you to put yourself at the mercy of the medical profession, I do believe you should let me take you to the emergency room. My car is right on Fifth Avenue. I’ll run you down to NYU Medical Center. It’s arguably less offensive than other ERs.”
I nodded dumbly, tugged on Turbo’s leash, and followed the man with the missing tooth to his car.
He helped me usher Turbo into the backseat where she plopped down, pleased at our adventure’s unusual turn.
“I’m Billy, by the way,” he said as he simultaneously maneuvered the car into traffic and gave me another handkerchief, this one plucked from the glove compartment of his Saab.
“Eloise,” I said.
“Nice to meet you.”
Billy kept Turbo entertained outside the hospital the entire two and a half hours it took for me to get taken care of. As I got my lip numbed then sewn up by a young and enthusiastic resident, I thought of Billy. It made no sense. I am not impulsive with men. That’s my sister Alice’s department. I prefer getting to know them, building up tension, making sure the attraction is solid and that the individual in question is not married or mentally ill.
When I finally emerged from the ER, I found Billy and Turbo standing out front. Turbo was gazing up at him, obviously communicating something. Billy in turn was looking at Turbo as if she were the most beautiful creature on the face of the earth.
“She’s an incredible dog,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed, coming closer. I looked up at him with what I hoped was less obvious longing than Turbo’s. I stood on tiptoes and kissed his mouth.
He was surprised at first. He pulled back fractionally, then returned the kiss, trying to be gentle on my injured lip, wrapping me in his long arms, crushing me to him as if he’d been waiting for me for years.
“This is unusual,” he said, when he pulled back from me.
“What is?”
“This affinity I feel for you.”
“Do you usually dislike people?”
“Mostly, yes.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s sad.”
“How can you possibly say that?”
“Isn’t life more interesting when you can look forward to chance affinities?”
“I hadn’t considered that,” he answered. “Can I take you home with me?”
“Yes. Please.”
We put Turbo in the backseat then got into his car, driving to his place way down on the Lower East Side where, Billy told me, he’s been living since the days when boys with sawed-off shotguns stood on the corners guarding the street drug trade.
“I used to get knifed and mugged a few times a month back in the day,” Billy said, in that wistful way people in their forties speak of New York as a very different place, a place where anything was permitted and the rich were confined Uptown.
Billy’s apartment was on the top floor of an old four- story building that had once been some sort of factory. The apartment was airy with high ceilings, old rusted steel beams, and a wall of windows.
“Is your dog a cat chaser? I have cats,” Billy said.
“No, she’s fine with my cat. How many cats do you have?”
“Three,” he said, “but I guess they’re all hiding.”
Three? I thought. But before I could thoroughly examine the red flags raised by the fact of multiple cats, Billy threw me down on the bed. He pinned my arms back and stared at me so deeply I thought he was going to paint my portrait. I was surprised by his intensity. Then surrendered to it in a way I couldn’t remember surrendering before.
He explored every inch of my body with his large hands and his soft mouth. He penetrated me with his fingers and then his very thick cock. I had a fleeting thought of condoms and with it AIDS, herpes, gonorrhea, and syphilis, but some part of my mind whispered, Don’t worry, Eloise, let it go. And I did.
“Do you run dog fights?” Billy asked at some point, maybe 4 a.m., after we had exhausted each other and were laying in the darkness, flat on our backs, shoulders touching.
“What?”
“Turbo’s ears are cropped.”
“Do I look like I run dog fights?”
“Yes,” he said, putting his hand between my legs.
“She was that way when my mom rescued her. Someone probably tried to get her to fight but she’s about the least aggressive dog I’ve ever met.”
“Are you a paratrooper?” he asked then.
“Where’d you get that one?”
“The hitch in your giddyup. The scars on your thighs. I thought you’d jumped from a plane and landed awkwardly.”
“Oh,” I said. “No. No plane jumping. Though I flew one once when I was eighteen.”
“And the hitch will remain a mystery?”
“Yes,” I said for reasons I failed to understand. I usually love telling all about the manhole crushing my pelvis and, if I trust and like the person, I even hint at the money the city gave me in exchange for swallowing me. But I didn’t want to discuss such things with Billy.
I fell back to sleep, my head in the crook of Billy’s neck, and woke as dawn was breaking through the wall of windows. Turbo was licking my face.
“You need to go out?” I asked the brown dog.
She looked at me meaningfully and wagged her tail.
“Okay,” I said softly, not wanting to wake Billy.
As I searched the floor for my pants, Billy suddenly sprang from the bed and ran into the bathroom. I put on my clothes and was looking for Turbo’s leash when he came back out, fully dressed.
“Oh,” I said, “you’re dressed. You want to come walk with us?”
“Walk?” He looked confused. “No, I have a lot of things to do. You’re going home now, yes?”
“Excuse me?” I said, shocked. It wasn’t even 6 a.m.
“Don’t take it personally. I just have things to do.”
I stared at him without blinking. He stared right back. There was nothing on his face. His eyes were a washy blue.
Turbo looked from me to Billy and back, sensing that something had gone wrong.
He offere
d me cab fare. I considered seeing if Turbo understood the command Kill.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, his eyes wide and innocent-looking.
“What could possibly be wrong?” I spat.
“Eloise, don’t be upset, I have things to do. You were awake. I figured you have things to do too.”
“Millions of things,” I said. “Come on, Turbo.”
I marched to the door, yanked it open, then slammed it behind me and went down the stairs as fast as my hitched giddyup would permit. Turbo bounded at my side, like we were heading for an exciting adventure.
I stood outside Billy’s building half expecting him to come to his senses, call out to me, etc… . But he didn’t. A rat scampered toward a garbage can.
I walked to Houston Street where, after hailing four cabs, I found one who was willing to take Turbo and me.
I got home, fed Hammie, and got into bed.
The phone woke me.
I grabbed it without checking the caller ID. “Yeah?”
“Are you sleeping in the middle of the day, you little slut?”
“Hi, Amy,” I said. “Rough night.”
Amy is my money manager and confidante. I met her on the subway one day when I dropped my keys and she picked them up and handed them to me. We’d gotten to talking and I’d trotted out my story of the manhole incident and even told her about the money. She was appalled when I’d confessed I had it all sitting in a savings account.
“Your money should be working so you don’t have to,” she’d said.
I don’t like money enough to send it to work. But Amy convinced me to let her tend to my modest vat of cash. This she does at a greatly reduced fee as she keeps hoping I’ll sleep with her even though I’ve always made it clear that that’s not on the horizon.
“What was rough about it?” Amy asked brightly.
“I had phenomenal sex.”
“With a woman, I hope.”
“Of course not.”
“What do you mean, of course not? You’ll see the beauty of my ways someday. There’s a big dyke inside you just waiting to get out.”
“Un huh.”
“So?” said Amy.