Red Dog, Red Dog

by Patrick Lane

  Norman’s question had been an insult, for he had no love for Billy Holdman, but he was drunk and had forgotten where Billy came from, the pride that rides wild out of worthlessness. Norman was deep into a bottle of scotch. His question didn’t invite an answer, for all he wanted to do was show off. Billy was only interested in the two beers he was holding in one hand, both bottles for himself, and the double gin he held in the other. The drink wasn’t for Vera, the girl he’d come with, but for Crystal, who was at the kitchen table, and who Billy knew would follow him out to his pickup truck or upstairs to the spare bedroom regardless of what Vera thought.

  Crystal had the calculating half-dreams of the poor. She’d grown up in a shotgun trailer with old towels for curtains. If anyone looked close at her they’d find a hole in a stocking, a seam stitched by a bad needle, a hem come down, or a twist in a sweater woven wrong. She had the curse of coming from nothing, all her plans a map leading her someday into a beat-up trailer worse than the one she came from, pregnant, with two bawling kids and bruises on her cheeks. To her a skirt and sweater in the end were just things a boy took off, blonde hair something they could grab. Tom figured the day Crystal was born she’d opened her eyes to a wrong world. Eddy said Crystal Wright was the kind of girl men fed upon, Billy, Joe, Harry, and the rest. Both brothers were right.

  Eddy and Tom had looked up to Billy when they were boys. He was older, but like them and most of their friends, he came from raw milk, wild meat, and stolen eggs. When Billy went to work in the bush, the money he earned went to his mother to feed the family. What he got to spend on himself came from riffling the pockets of some passed-out Indian in an alley back of the bar who still had treaty money on him, a logger three sheets to the wind, or a white-trash girl on her worn heels. He also sold things that could be sold to someone else, copper wire stripped from a house going up or coming down, stolen batteries melted down for lead, a car radio or a record player lifted from a house, or the soiled and oil-streaked hard-earned dollars and cents some garage or corner store man had the foolishness to leave in a tin box or till over a Sunday night.

  When he got a little older, Billy discovered gambling. He was razor-sharp at reading a car or horse, a dog or a fighting cock, and his betting on racing or fighting either man or beast or bird usually resulted in him having more money than when he arrived. He had one sure source of cash and that was the dog fights. His last pit of the season was coming up on Saturday out at Carl Janek’s farm.

  When Tom was a boy, he’d seen Billy sell his slow-witted sister, Nancy, out of a coal shed down by the tracks for nickels and dimes to older boys. Later, the story went, he sold her to men who could get no other woman, men from the bars or back streets who’d tried and never got a last dance, men who didn’t know how to get anyone except in their wretched hand-held dreams. Nancy was at the party in tow of Lester Coombs, who was in town again. Billy had brought him out to the party to show off his big connection from Vancouver. Before letting him in that afternoon, Eddy had made Lester turn over the pistol he carried, Lester taking the Smith & Wesson .22 out of his belt from under his leather jacket, and Eddy putting it away in the tub of the wringer washing machine. Lester said the pistol had better still be there for him to get when he left. Eddy and Tom had just looked at him, this guy from the coast who probably thought they were all a bunch of rednecks, good only for buying what he’d brought for Billy to sell.

  The party had begun two nights before, the word having gone down into the town and out into the country that there was a wild time to be had Saturday night at Eddy Stark’s house. Saturday afternoon Mother locked herself in her bedroom at the corner of the house, the snap of the deadbolt loud as it slipped into its slot. The iron bars lag-bolted into her one window completed what Mother called her privacy. She told Eddy and Tom she had a knife and was prepared should some drunk try to break into her room. Eddy had told her that she’d be all right. It’s just a party, he’d said. Mother didn’t try to answer that and neither did Tom.

  Mother had been down her own roads and couldn’t bear Eddy’s parties, the drinking, cards, and dancing, cars and trucks coming and going in flares of dust and grit at all hours of the night and day, people dragging themselves around the house trying to sleep off their carouse. Such chaos was too much for her who thought she’d lived through enough in her life. Over the years she’d become solitary, reclusive, alien to all but family, though Tom reckoned her being a stranger to family too. She had no friends. What women she might have known when she and Father moved to the valley had drifted away after Rose disappeared. Their questions about her vanishing were left unanswered but for Mother looking at some nosy woman in the door through half-closed eyes and shaking her head. She told whoever asked that there had been no birth, only a death, and though neighbour women could add up the months and figure she’d carried to term, they said nothing to anyone, certain they knew all that went on in the Stark house out on Ranch Road. The women stopped coming to the house. Sometimes they could be seen sitting in cars driving by, their heads turned, mouths grim as they stared, their men keeping their eyes on the ruts and ditches.

  In his last years, Father began wandering around drunk with the shotgun at night. Deadbolt or not, it made Mother nervous. Father knew where he was to sleep and it wasn’t with her. Tom was careful around him and would run into the orchard when Father started muttering, gun in hand. Tom would lie near the graves and watch the house until everything was still. The bats told him Father was passed out and sleeping. Only when the yard was quiet did the bats return through the cracks in the fascia to their attic roosts. Eddy wasn’t afraid, but after a while he had respect enough for Father’s ways to disappear into the night and not return till dawn. The cot in the root cellar was Father’s place when he was drunk and otherwise the couch in the living room, but he never lasted a whole night in either place.

  Mother had asked Eddy to put the bolt in her door the night of her small revenge. She had left a kitchen chair out where Father was wont to walk. He tripped over it, accidentally springing both barrels of the shotgun in the dark. When Tom heard Father yell about it the next day, he knew she’d left the chair out deliberately, but she swore she hadn’t and that Father ought to have known better than to be walking around the house at night with a loaded gun. She’d asked Tom and Eddy: Who does he think he’s hunting, if not me?

  There was no clear answer to that. It could well have been Mother, though both boys thought it was the sworn phantom enemies Father complained about from week to week, men who’d caused him harm at some time or another. His losing the tractor to the bank in 1949 was one such misery. The Reo dump truck being seized seven years ago had been his last chance to own his life. After that, he drove Cat or logging truck for outfits that hadn’t gone under, losing jobs because of his anger, his sneering at others, him telling them they didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground when it came to making a dollar in the bush.

  What Father earned he kept for himself, giving Mother a handful of change a night or two after pay day, a few crumpled, leftover dollar bills from his shirt pocket. The rest he’d spent in the bars gambling and drinking. The food he brought home he’d traded for: carrots, onions, and potatoes given to him by some farmer in exchange for a hind-quarter from a moose or a deer he’d shot out of season. Flour and sugar, salt, lard, and rice he’d get from Winning Chow down at the New Dawn Café. He’d dicker with the Chinaman in exchange for a side of pork he’d lifted from someone’s smokehouse, chickens he’d stolen from a coop down Oyama way, the birds stuffed into potato sacks, their beaks poking through the coarse weave. What other the family ate, Mother grew or the boys hunted for, stole, or bought on credit at the grocery store, Mr. Olafson phoning every few weeks, reminding them of the money they owed, taking the occasional dollar the boys brought and marking it down in his book, a balance never reached.

  There were two holes in the wall by the china cabinet that Tom could put his foot inside. One shotgun blast had gone right
through to the other side so Tom could peer from the hall into the dining room. Father would be far gone when he began to wander the house for lack of sleep. He’d search the rooms for bottles he’d hidden and forgotten. The blowing apart of the dining-room wall was enough to make Mother fear his bursting in and holding her to account with the shotgun while he demanded what he thought was his right. Mother said to whichever of her sons was near enough to hear: God knows what right he thinks he was entitled to. God knows.

  They’d hear him shout at her from the yard about how it was no wonder he went looking for other women. I’m still a man!

  Go to hell, she’d hiss.

  Tom came into the house, put the shotgun back up on its nails, and stared down the hall at Mother’s door. He’d seen her two days ago, squirrelling away her bottles of Seagram’s 83, a galvanized pail for her needs, cigarettes, and various foods. She said she was not about to emerge into what she called Eddy’s craziness, saying to Tom, Father’s come out in him again, and that was true enough for both of them, though Tom felt what blood he had was different than what pumped in his brother’s skull.

  Tom imagined Mother in her bed, honing her paring knife on a fingernail file as she muttered imprecations at the man who’d ruined her life. All those years of moving from farm to ranch to town, to the poor land they lived on now, what she called their half-assed bit of nothing. He’d promised her more and she’d got less, each day and month and year eating into that dream until there was nothing left but bits of threadbare rag, something to line the nests of field mice, the burrows of rats. Tom could hear her through the bedroom door ask Eddy as he was kneading her back, her muscles thin ropes in his Vaseline hands: Just who does he think he is? Tom knew Eddy gave little thought to what she said, having heard it all too many times before.

  In the afternoons when Father was off working in the bush, Eddy would go down the hall to see Mother, and one morning Tom thought of a way to climb inside their secrecy. Mother always went to the garden early in the afternoon, where she argued with the young corn that seemed slow to grow and worried the peas, driving in stakes and tying them up with string so they wouldn’t sag and rot. One day he waited in his attic bedroom until he heard her leave the house, then he went downstairs to her room where he made a hurried nest in the shadows under her bed, pushing the empty bottles against the wall into the drift of torn magazines and crinkled candy wrappers. He was eight years old.

  His bare foot was braced against the wall and the other hooked to a spring. It seemed to him he was crawling upside down on the bottom of her mattress. One hand gripped the hind leg of the bed, the other the mattress rim. The quilt hung from the side of the bed like a curtain. He rested his cheek on the floor and peered out from behind the cotton squares and waited for Mother to return, terrified of what she would do if she caught him hiding there.

  He waited a long time before he heard her come back in the house. She went to the record player in the living room and put on “Stormy Weather,” turning it up so she could hear it all the way into her room. As Tom watched from under the bed, she seemed to him to be a girl again, light on her feet as she turned on the floor. It was like she was dancing by her salt lake, a place she’d told him about one time.

  Just as the song ended, Eddy opened the door, his face empty. Mother smiled and told him to play the record again. He went to put it on again and when he came back, she held out her arms. Tom hadn’t known his brother could dance. Eddy glided with her by the bed. Tom watched him from under the quilt, his brother’s face appearing and disappearing as he turned in slow circles. Mother’s eyes were closed, but Eddy’s were open, staring into the room, and there was a look on his face Tom had never seen before. It was as if his brother had lost something, but what it was Tom didn’t know, this thing he was doing, holding Mother and moving as if she was nothing in his arms, and then the rasp of the needle in its grooves on the turntable, the wish-tic, wish-tic, wish-tic and the click of the record arm rising, the turntable spinning to a halt. She went to the bed then, Eddy lying down beside her, the two of them above and Tom below. Looking up, Tom could see the shapes of their bodies in the grey mattress. Tom lay still, listening as Mother’s breathing became laboured in sleep, lulled by Eddy’s sing-song, husha husha hush! It was a sound Tom had heard over the years through the door. Tom remembered the feeling that was in the room, and though he couldn’t have put a name to it back then he knew what it was now. Loneliness. That’s what had been in there, not just his mother’s and his brother’s, but his too, him lying there under the bed, utterly alone, and waiting.

  Tom went down the hall and knocked on Mother’s door the secret code of three sharp raps and two lighter taps. He could hear her on the other side of the door, like a trapped fox. Are you all right? he asked.

  Who’s been shooting that gun?

  Don’t worry, he said. It was just someone fooling around. Do you need anything? He knew she had a cache of kubasaw, process cheese, and salted crackers stored in shoe-boxes in the closet, more than enough, given her lack of appetite. All she seemed to want to eat were her radishes. Eddy cut them with his knife into roses and put them in sealed water jars in the refrigerator. She’d said often enough they were all that kept her blood running.

  Where’s Eddy?

  Up in his room where he always is, said Tom.

  Mother was quiet for a moment and then said: Go away. He heard her bare feet on the floor as she went to her bed. One day he knew he would knock and there’d be no answer. She’d die in there and he and Eddy would have to break the door down so they could bury her. Every year with her seemed harder than the last since Father died. No matter his accusations, she always said, it was her blackness after her daughters’ births that killed them. She’d sunk into the shadows and there was no coming up for months. She had lain staring up into the ceiling as if trying to see through the stained tiles all the way to the night.

  You never wanted any truck with a girl, he’d say when they were in the midst of a yelling match. When have you ever thought about Rose and Alice?

  Which daughter? The ones you buried or the one you burned?

  Their accusations were always at the end of a drunken fight about why there wasn’t enough wood piled up for winter, not enough food, no money, something, nothing, a dropped mug, a broken toaster, a greasy wrench left on the arm of the couch in the living room, an empty bottle, isolation or contempt. At the end, Father’s voice would always rise to a cry about the girls, a sign he’d ceded the floor to her. Go to hell, he’d yell as she went down the hall. And then her words to him: Hell? Where’s that? Here?

  Tom tried to drive out Mother’s and Father’s angry words, gripping his ears in his hands, but he could see Mother standing over Father’s body down by the well. Eddy had brought her down from the house the night Father died. His father was lying there, legs crooked in a pool of creek water, part of his head gone and the shotgun lying beside the pump, barrels pointing at the North Star. Misery, she said, Father in the grass by the stone wellhead, blood like iron scum floating on the creek pools, his brains scattered in the grass as if he’d wanted to think along with the grasshoppers and beetles about what living and dying were. Tom was the one who dug the hole and buried him. When he was finished, he came back from the orchard with the wheelbarrow and the shovel. She sat beside him on the lip of the well, staring down where Father had been lying with his feet in the creek and said: Blood is blood and sometimes better gone. Tom, frightened, exhausted, looked at her, but there was no tear he could see in her eye. A stillness, yes, as if she was a snake, lidless and staring, gone out of the sun to rest in the cool that darkness promises.

  Tom turned from Mother’s locked-down life. He walked up the hall and saw a couple there, leaning against the wall in a clench, one grunting and the other breathing out a moan. The boy’s hand was under the girl’s skirt, holding her buttock. She was hanging on to his neck as if afraid she might sink into some torrent and drown. They were likely strangers from tow
n, drunk on the glory they’d gained by being at one of Eddy’s parties, gatherers, hangers-on.

  There was a shadow rising in him like pit water climbing up a narrow shaft and he wished it far away. He looked down at the floor, feeling again the fir splinters in his knees and palms, hurting him. He was just small. He’d stopped and was leaning his head down. His nose had been sniffing, something thick in it, a smell he’d known and not known before. It was dust and wax and heat, heavy, and polished there by the shuffle of feet, the scour of brushes and cloths. The smell was a blow so thick it gagged his throat.

  He didn’t want to be that child, but suddenly he saw himself upstairs on the landing crawling, eyes closed, following the soft whisper that was Mother’s nightgown trailing. She was crawling too. When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t find her. She had turned the corner where the stairs angled up to the attic. He rocked there on his knees and hands, naked but for a pair of tattered pyjama bottoms. It was so strange to move back and forth and not go anywhere. Tom’s chest heaved now with the memory of it. He was at the top of the stairs and he could hear things breaking down below. Dishes shattered and something heavy fell on the kitchen floor. He could hear the sprinkle that was the last sound of glass. Like glare ice sliding from a roof, the thud as Father’s fist hit a wall. He was drunk again. The glass sprinkle diminished until it was only a music playing on Tom’s skin. He kept trying to move. He knew where Mother was. She was in the secret cupboard. He couldn’t see the hiding place because it was under the stairs. He rocked harder, but his knees wouldn’t budge and his toes slipped on the wood. He’d gone to the cupboard before but he knew he wouldn’t be allowed in. Mother would be in there with Eddy. They were hiding and there was only room for two. No, is what she always said. He knew that’s what he’d hear if he butted the door with his head.

  Go away, you little bugger, she’d hiss. Hide somewhere else.