Red Dog, Red Dog

by Patrick Lane

  Why don’t they sting you? she asked.

  They’re tired. In times of fasting there’s no sting.

  Marilyn said: Sometimes you speak like the Bible.

  They’re a wonder all their own, he said, hoping she’d understand.

  The wasps licked the light sweat from his temples as they crept upon his forehead, opening and closing their fretted wings. A single wasp fell across the sight of his eye, and then another, the chains of their woven bodies coming apart as they dropped from his face and hair. Others crawled down his neck and across his shoulders to the bed where their sisters waited. He said their legs were a trickle on his skin, a tickle as of water drying there.

  Sometimes I think I should be scared of you. Other girls are.

  It’s because you’re not, you’re here.

  She played her fingers down his arm to his wrist and laid it on his hurt hand. You’re hot, she said. Your hand is burning.

  It’s nothing, he said. Wasps moved on the window screen above him, their passage over the rusted wire slow and measured.

  I’m going to get up and go down to the bathroom now, she said, and lifted her arm, rolling away, suddenly shy to be naked in front of him. Close your eyes.

  He did as she told him, his eyes almost shut, and saw her stop in the middle of the room, picking up his shirt from where he’d dropped it. She draped it over her shoulders, the shirt hanging from her small body almost down to her knees, turning the cuffs in folds up to her wrists. A single wasp rode on the lobe of her ear, a spot of gold, an earring that seemed to contain in its presence both threat and blessing.

  When he heard her going down the stairs, he got out of bed and pulled on his clothes and shoes. She’d be all right staying here, he thought. Mother would have to get used to it. They’d go to her trailer so she could pick up some of her things, but that would be later. First, he needed to talk to Eddy.

  16

  tom wound through John Hurlbert’s orchard, the truck lights low as he neared the farmhouse, a black-patch dog standing under the yard light barking maniacally, crazed by a strange truck arriving. He stopped beside John’s pickup. He watched the house and saw a flashlight come on in the side kitchen. He knew he’d woken them up and hoped whoever was holding the light wasn’t Maureen. Her days were long, not so much because of John, but because she made her hours that way, the house, the orchard and garden, chickens and goats, the milk cow, her children and grandchildren out there in the valley somewhere. He thought of John getting older, and him waking up to his dog barking, a strange vehicle in the yard.

  Tom got out and went around to the front of the truck so whoever was there would see him clear when they came out of the house. The dog raged a few feet away. The flashlight flickered across the kitchen window, thin curtains parting a fraction as someone looked out. Then the door opened and he heard John shout at the dog to shut the hell up. Not Maureen then. Tom could see him, the flashlight’s glow on the frizzled grey hair on his naked chest, his body half in and half out the door as he looked at the truck and Tom standing there.

  What in christ’s name are you doing, Tom, coming out here this time of night?

  John came further out, leaning a gun of some sort against a porch post. I could of shot you where you’re standing. This here shotgun’s loaded with slugs, you know.

  I came to see my brother, Tom said. I’m real sorry I woke you.

  It’s that gawdamn dog woke me, said John, and he came down onto the bottom step of the porch. He pointed at his feet and said: C’mon over here. I’m barefoot and I ain’t walking out there. There’s every manner of nail and bolt lying around.

  Tom crossed the yard and came into the light playing on the dirt. Hurlbert lifted the flashlight and stroked it quickly across Tom’s face. You came to see Eddy, eh.

  I thought he was here, down at the shack. I don’t see his car.

  Yeah, he’s here. Harry put Eddy’s car in the shed over there. Harry left a while ago. He’s in and out, you know. He’s never been much for staying anywhere too long at a time. John hesitated a moment as if thinking about what he was going to say and then said: Sorry about your brother. He’s not looking half good. Speaking of which, what’d you do to that hand of yours?

  An accident out at the house. I cut it with a chisel. It’s nothing, said Tom. John was standing there in a pair of corduroy pants cinched tight under his belly. I’ll go down there then, Tom said. You better get back into the house. It’s cool out these nights.

  The dog had sidled up, growling, its ruff flaring, and John leaned down as if to pick up a rock and the dog scuttled away, its tail tight between its legs. That one’s a good dog, John said. It’s just he’s old is all. The stupid dog doesn’t know the difference any more between a stranger and a friend. The wife calls him That Damned Dog. I don’t call him anything but Shut the Hell Up.

  He’s doing what a watchdog’s supposed to do, I guess.

  Yeah, well, said John, I suppose you’re right there. At least it’s a reason to let him keep on living.

  So I’ll just get on down to the shack, Tom said, twisting his foot in the dirt. He looked at the dog skulking by the truck, pissing on the front tire.

  John hitched at the buckle of his belt. Shit, he said, looking down. My gawdamn fly’s open. He fumbled at the buttons a second and then said: The hell with it. If that dog bothers you, shoot it.

  Tom held his hands up. I don’t have a gun, he said, grinning.

  Lucky dog, said John as he crossed the porch and went back into the house, the light wavering in the window and then gone.

  Tom leaned down and picked up a couple of pebbles from the dirt at his feet and tossed them at the dog who was sniffing now at the other tire. It shied away and slipped back into the darkness by a shed where a rusted John Deere tractor squatted by the chain-locked doors. The dog crawled under the tractor engine and sat down on a swale of straw.

  Tom looked back at the house for a second and thought of Maureen. He’d been out there off and on over the years and liked her. She was Okanagan Indian from the Reserve at the head of the lake. She was a kindly woman who’d long ago learned to tolerate John’s rough ways. They’d had four boys, all of them nearby in the valley, married with kids. Harry and their youngest son, Elijah, had been friends until Elijah moved onto the Reserve. Maureen had told Tom once that it was best so for Elijah. She said he was the one needed to know his own people most, no matter he was a half-breed. Tom hadn’t seen much of him in the past few years. It was Harry’s friendship with Elijah that got Harry the shack in the orchard. John let him use it for nothing. Eddy staying there now was a part of those other days.

  Tom started the truck and turned the lights on, small blue moths coming out of the night. He drove slowly, the moths bellying out in a cloud and vanishing along the doors as he cut the wheel and took the turn down to where the path led to the shack. Tom loved the quiet of the night out in the valley and wished he was there for any other reason than he was, but Eddy was down in the shack and, his brother sleeping or not, he had things to tell him.

  At the far edge of the orchard, he turned the truck around and parked it by an irrigation ditch. The shack was down a long trail by the creek. It looked like apple picking was finished here. The trees seemed relieved the fruit was gone, their branches slowly lifting from their autumn sag. He could hear the creek purling ahead of him. It came down from Hadow Lake behind the Kalamalka hills. It was good water. John was lucky to have such on his place.

  There was enough light for him to see the path. He followed it down to the creek and to the abandoned picker’s shack that was Harry’s refuge, a place where he brought runaway girls he found at the bus depot, a place where he could hide out when things got rough back in town. Tom wondered if John and Maureen knew about the girls Harry brought out there and then thought they probably did and didn’t care to ask questions about it. Harry was to Maureen a kind of wayward son, he’d spent so much time there as a kid. She’d forgive him the girls or j
ust accept it. It was what Indians did, something his own people had a hard time with, forgiveness, acceptance.

  Tom made his way along the path by the creek, starlight and the moon enough so he could see. Head down, so he wouldn’t trip on an errant root, he noticed fresh deer sign in the damp soil. He followed the delicate hoofprints, seeing where the deer stopped to take a mouthful of grass, a bite from a fallen apple, the marks of its teeth clean in the white flesh. The hulk of the shack loomed just ahead. He could see the smokeless black tube of the tin chimney in the slanted roof. It would be cold in there the way the shack was stuck back in the trees by the creek. He stepped onto the cracked porch boards and said his brother’s name.

  There was nothing but night sound around him, a cricket or two creaking in a brush pile. The creek chuckled over stones off to his left. He waited, but there was no answer, so he turned the peg on the flimsy door. He pushed it in, the door grabbing for a second on the sill. He stood in the doorway, his hand on the bent spike that served as a handle. Eddy was sitting in an old chair close by a window, his feet up on a crate. A grey army blanket was pulled over his legs and tucked around him. Beside the chair was what looked like half a bottle of rye whiskey and on the arm an empty glass perched precariously. Eddy was staring out the window at the moonlight falling in fragments on the brown creek water. Hey Tom, Eddy said, without turning.

  Tom let go of the doornail and went all the way in. He’d been in the shack over the years, and as he looked around in the weak moonlight he saw that nothing much had changed. There was still the rusty Queen heater propped up on four uneven bricks, the upholstered chair with Eddy in it, a table and a wooden chair pushed against the wall, a calendar with a naked girl on it that said it was still 1953 in spite of five years gone past. On the table were cold candle stubs in various stages of melt, pooled wax spread in gouts on the worn wood, Eddy’s works laid out, and a deck of playing cards with their faces up, kings and jacks in their finery staring up at the ceiling, four aces in a line, separate from the rest. In the backroom was the three-quarter bed with a couple of straw ticks on it. Or at least there used to be.

  You know, said Eddy, turning to Tom for the first time, you look at a creek long enough you can almost figure everything out.

  How you doing, Eddy?

  Eddy turned back to the window. I’m okay, he said. I didn’t count on seeing you out this way, you back at the mill and all. Before Tom could answer, Eddy said: What the hell, I guess I should ask what you came out here for.

  Tom took a breath and then another and began to tell his brother about hauling the old man’s body from the house. I cleaned the floor, he said, and put things in order as best I could. I found the two shells but not the rifle, so I’m counting on you having it. Fuck it, Eddy. I buried that old man. This’s a bad situation you’ve got us into, you know? For christ’s sake, you just killed somebody. People are going to be looking for him. They might already be looking for you.

  There was a silence and then Eddy said: I was sitting here thinking about that time Father was out in the shed with those two deer he shot up the Commonage that time. He had them trussed up to the hooks on the rafter there in the back. You know how he used to like to hang a carcass for a few days before cutting it up.

  Eddy, said Tom. Did you hear what I said?

  Shutup a second, Tom. Just listen. I was telling you about that time.

  Tom stood there and thought he was going to go out of his mind. Which time? he said. There were dozens of times Father did that. He’d hang deer and sheep and whatever else that needed to season for a day or two to get the meat to set. Shit, he even hung a moose there once and damn near pulled the roof down on himself. Which time are you talking about?

  We were both there. Remember how we thought Father slaughtering deer was such a big deal when we were little kids. That old drunk was quite the hero, wasn’t he? When Tom just looked at him, Eddy went on. Anyways, we were watching him wash out the cavities and he called us over. There was that old tin basin on the bench and in it were the livers and hearts. Remember how Mother used to love a stuffed deer heart? They were a real delicacy, she used to say.

  Where’s this going, Eddy?

  Anyway, he leaned down and took those two hearts from the basin. Remember? He held them out, one in each hand and told us that it was the strangest thing but when he gutted those deer he found two hearts in one animal and none in the other.

  Eddy gave an odd smile then and when Tom pulled out the wooden chair from the table and sat down, he said: Remember how we believed him? Hell, we were stupid back then.

  We were just kids.

  Anyway, it’s what I was thinking about.

  Eddy, pay attention here. What happened at the party is all over town. You shot a guy and pissed off a lot of people too.

  You think Lester and Billy are going to go to the police with their stories? What, and lay charges?

  Stanley’s on to something already. He drove out to the old man’s house. I saw his car on the road that night and followed him back there.

  Something fluttered across the window.

  Eddy looked out again. What’s one old man less in the world anyway?

  Anger flared in Tom. He choked and cleared his throat, spitting on the floor between his feet. Do you know what it’s like hauling an old man’s body out of his house and then having to bury him? Do you know what that’s like?

  Do you know what it’s like killing one? he said.

  They were both silent suddenly, Eddy pulling the army blanket over his feet. Tom was cold all over, his heart beating fast. He couldn’t remember being so angry. Not like this. He looked at his brother, thinking there was nothing under that grey skin but bones and heroin.

  Eddy sucked in a loud breath and let it out as if it were the last breath he’d ever take. I shouldn’t have said that. Ah, who cares, he said, his hands rising off the chair and then falling back, thin plumes of dust rising through his fingers. The glass on the arm teetered and fell, the small tumbler breaking. None of it matters a damn, Eddy said.

  Tom got to his feet, the blood running crazily in him. I’m going to go, he said, his head full of weaving shadows.

  What’s going to happen is going to happen, said Eddy. There’s one thing I know in this world and that is there’s nothing you can do about nothing. Go on home, Tom. I’ll see you at the dog fights Saturday.

  Out in the dark the dog barked. The sound came faint from the farmyard and when it died there was a deeper quiet than there’d been. Eddy turned his head to the window again and for a moment Tom tried to fathom what he’d just seen in his brother’s face. It was a kind of sorrowing, but who it was for, he couldn’t tell. Him or Eddy or just the trouble he was in, this stupid shack in an orchard, him hiding, waiting for Harry to come back.

  17

  there are many kinds of water. Mostly I like the one at the end of winter when everything’s half-frozen. The creek grows strange ice in the spring, sometimes in hollow columns full of air. When the sun hits them, it casts a fractured light, bands of colour breaking every which way above the water running below. If you put your ear to the ice, you can hear it talking. There are voices inside those hollows. A bobcat drinking in February will sometimes leave a trapped sound there. So will a coyote or a deer. On a melt day, you can hear what happened weeks ago, the creek talking, a pheasant’s cluck, a sparrow’s chitter. Everything crowds near water in a desert. It’s where the living go to live. Out on the dry land is where you find the dead.

  I remember once seeing Eddy at the bones of a cougar. The skeleton was out in the Bluebush hills where there were no trees, just the rare Ponderosa alone and brooding. Eddy was up there by himself, Tom off somewhere with his dog, hunting birds in the arroyo thickets at the foot of the mountain. Eddy went out alone sometimes on Sundays, there being nothing much in town to interest him, the stores closed, everything locked up. He never carried a gun, just an old hunting knife that Father never used any more, the scabbard split whe
re the web was torn away. He carried it as much for show as anything. There was little he could do with just a knife up there. When he came upon the cougar, bits of hide and bones were all that was left. The critters had got to it, beetles, crows, and buzzards, the never-ending flies. Eddy was still young then, thirteen years old, and finding a dead cougar was something big to him, dreaming like he did of someday killing one.

  He crouched there among the pebbles and rocks, little pincushion cactus like upside down spoons, pink flowers growing among their spines. It was late spring and the snow melt and thin rains had given the cactus enough strength to blossom. It was like he wanted to put the big cat back together from where the scavengers had scattered it. The prize, of course, was the skull, the big incisors worn down, an old animal and far from water. It was strange how the big cat had died like that, out in the open. Most animals when they’re old and sick find a place to hide away. But not this cougar. I don’t know if Eddy thought about that, so preoccupied was he in bringing the ribs together, arranging them in their order along the dried ligaments and tendons of the spine. The tail was mostly gone, the bones small, lost among pebbles and rocks.

  But he got it done as best he could. Lying there when he was finished, the cat bones looked like they were flying, the legs spread out like wings, and perched on its lower jaw, the skull, the cougar staring through its empty sockets at whatever it had seen that it hadn’t got to, maybe the lakes. Up on the mountain’s side you can see all three of them and the cougar was high enough up for that. Maybe that’s what it wanted, not just to get there, but to look at where it had hunted once, the places it had waited out the deer coming down through the coulees to drink along the beaches.

  I thought he’d take the skull home to show you, Tom, but he didn’t. He left it up there, staring sightless at what its paws had known, its hunting ground, its home. Eddy was there and then he was gone, a boy cutting slant along the mountainside until he passed into the bush near the bottom at the edge of a farm, nothing left to show he was ever up there, but for those cat bones flying. Vanishing is what Eddy did best. He was always the blink of an eye, there and gone even when he was small. Remember?