Taking Care

by Joy Williams

  Lola’s mouth was cold, as though she had been chewing ice. She kept raising her chin as she moved her tongue around in her mouth, until her head was tipped back so far she could barely see them.

  The one that had spoken first said, “Name of Cale Barfield. This here,” he flapped his hand at his companion, “J.J. Leape.”

  J. J. stamped his boots on the ground and moved his head up and down curtly as though he were afraid someone was going to see him do it. He wore a Navy flight jacket and had incredibly clear blue eyes, like a baby’s.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Lola said. “I couldn’t care less who you are, but I certainly would like to know what you’re doing here.”

  “We lost our dawgs,” Cale said serenely, pulling himself back up on the hood of the truck. “Three. One blue,” he spread his hand before his face and waggled a finger. “One black ’n’ tan and one dawg.”

  “I couldn’t care less what you are doing here,” Lola said and then stopped, confused. She still had her arms full of trash and she pressed it closer to her chest. “You’ve got to leave.” Her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere behind her.

  “We didn’t know no one was here. We thought hit a summer camp all closed up. Curtains all closed up. Nothing here. No cars or gear nor nothing. Looks closed to me, don’t hit to you, J.J.?”

  The boy with the blue eyes slammed the door of the cab shut and sat down on the running board. Hanging in the rear window were two rifles and a shotgun. J.J.’s eyes looked crayoned in. He looked at Lola so carelessly that she felt she wasn’t being looked at at all.

  “I live here,” she said. “And my husband lives here.” She began backing into the trailer. She was afraid to look down at herself or where she was going because she thought that if she did, she would find something dreadfully disarranged.

  “If we leave the truck setting in one place, them dawgs will find hit,” Cale said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Oh yeah, that’s shor right,” Cale smiled.

  She dropped what she was carrying into a chair and slammed the door shut and locked it. Then she poured herself a drink and walked back to the bathroom and closed and locked that door and sat on the edge of the tub and sipped her drink. She was a nice person! She was clean. She didn’t throw things out the car window. Her mouth quivered on the rim of the glass. At her feet was a newspaper. A headline said

  MOTHER THINKS SON IN GIANT’S COMPANY

  She finished the drink and unlocked the bathroom door and walked down the hallway to the kitchen. Cale and J.J. were standing in the living room. Even before she saw them, she could smell the cold air of the woods and their muddy woolen clothes.

  “We thought you’d gone and was trying to find paper to write you a note,” Cale said. “We’ve had some drinks of your water and we wanted to tell you about the hogs that’s been running through your yard.”

  “I locked that door,” Lola said faintly.

  “Nome.”

  “I know I did.”

  “Nome. We could open hit.”

  Lola sat down on the couch. She thought of going back to the bathroom and getting the can of toilet bowl cleaner and throwing it in their eyes, but there wasn’t any place for her to go after she had done that. There wasn’t any way for her to escape into the woods. It would be like trying to run off the edge of the world, she knew. “Look,” she said severely, “my husband is a newscaster on television.”

  They looked at her politely. “Whatsis name?” Cale asked.

  “Dundey.” I have them now, she thought wildly. They’ll go now. “On WTVB. Jim Dundey.”

  J.J. seemed interested for the first time. His mouth rolled back and his eyes glazed as though he’d been hit in the back of the head. He started laughing in short whistling gasps. “Jim Dandy! He’s suckering you. Thaters no name for a man. Thaters a name of dawg food!” He laughed carefully and with concentration as though it was something that took talent, and then stopped abruptly and shook his head. On the sleeve of his jacket was a wide crust of red, like a scab. Lola thought that if it fell off and onto her carpet, she would drop to the floor and never move again.

  Cale wasn’t laughing but his face had squeezed up to two-thirds its regular size and his eyebrows were level with his hairline. Everyone was silent and not looking at each other.

  “We don’t watch no television ourselfs,” Cale said in a hoarse voice. “We had a tee vee onct but we swopped hit for a Walker and before he run away he were a twice better Walker than hit were a tee vee.”

  Lola felt that J.J.’s blue eyes were sitting in her lap. Inside, she was running and running and almost out of breath.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that none,” Cale went on, “if that’s indeed his name. Someone’s given names to everything on this earth. There ain’t nothing what don’t got a name.” His cheeks fell in as though he had suddenly lost all his teeth. “Ain’t that sad?”

  “I think that it’s a very good thing,” Lola said stiffly.

  J.J. took two steps forward and two steps back. He smelled like a storm coming. “Bunch of smartasses went around and cat-a-logued hit all,” he muttered.

  Cale ducked his head uncomfortably and pushed the curtains back. It was dusk and the trees were darker than the sky. “Now,” he said, “if you would lookitere, you could see where them hogs torn the place up.”

  Lola rose obediently and walked to the window. The ground was tumbled and stacked as though by several erratic plows. Long muddy nests were everywhere. Water-filled hollows. Small trees had been beaten over. The land looked bombed.

  “I haven’t seen that before,” Lola said. “It always looks like a wreck out there to me.”

  “You here all day long?” Cale asked.

  Lola didn’t answer. The three of them were in a semicircle, looking at the woods, with their arms dangling and their faces empty as though they had just finished a long and meaningful conversation.

  “What I mean was they make a racket. If you’d of heard em you could of shot em. That meat is just so lean and sweet …”

  “Make enough noise coming through to wake the dead,” J.J. said fiercely, as though he had been insulted.

  “Uh-huh,” Cale said.

  “The quick and the dead,” J.J. continued. “You familiar with what is ‘quick’?”

  Lola went to the kitchen sink and stood there, running water over her hands.

  “Naw,” Cale said, “I ain’t.”

  “Unborn,” J.J. said, shrugging.

  “Noise even for that,” Cale said. “Hit’s probably true.”

  “I am going to make dinner now for my husband,” Lola announced, “who is going to be back any moment. And I am going to make myself a drink.” She twisted the water faucets on as far as they would go and said, “Would you like to have a drink?” The running water made so much noise, she couldn’t hear herself saying it.

  J.J. zipped up his jacket and opened the door. He whistled sharply. Nothing happened. He jumped off the deck, not bothering to shut the door, and they heard him get in the truck and start the motor.

  “We’ll be going now,” Cale sighed. “I guess them hounds might be waiting on the highway.” He started out the door and almost collided with J.J., who was coming back in.

  “You’ll be watching out for them dawgs and keeping them for us then when they come by?” J.J. said, jerking his eyes over Lola. She tried not to pay attention to him. He wore baggy trousers with rows of flap pockets extending all the way down to the cuff. From one of the pockets, he took out three quarters and laid them on the table. “Jest tie em up and give em a bucket of water and this here is for food. One name Don, the black ‘n’ tan.”

  “They won’t be coming through here,” Lola said. “You’ll find them someplace else.”

  J.J. looked at her with no curiosity at all and, with Cale following, went back out to the truck.

  “Bye fer now,” Cale said.

  The truck tore away recklessly, leaving a
smell of oil on the air.

  It was six o’clock, the light almost gone, and time for the newscast. Lola turned on the television. She made a drink and drank it, then picked up the quarters from the table. On the television, something was being said. She turned off the sound and went outside, on the deck. The woods were wild at nightfall. She heard dim crashings and splashes and the bark of a dog, and through the gaps in the trees was a mottled sky of fading pink and grey discs, microbes moving toward the west.

  She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldn’t save her. She lay down on the deck with the woods all around her. She lay on her stomach and stretched out her arms. She could see the ground through the spaces between the pine planking. Over the months, things had spilled down there. She saw a cigarette lighter and a pencil. She saw a spoon down there, dully twinkling, offering to her the blurred, quite unrecognizable image of her face.

  Shepherd

  IT had been three weeks since the girl’s German shepherd had died. He had drowned. The girl couldn’t get over it. She sat on the porch of her boyfriend’s beach house and looked at the water.

  It was not the same water. The house was on the Gulf of Mexico. The shepherd had drowned in the bay.

  The girl’s boyfriend had bought his house just the week before. It had been purchased furnished with mismatched plates and glasses, several large oak beds, an assortment of green wicker furniture and an art deco ice bucket with its handles in the shape of penguins.

  The girl had a house of her own on the broad seawalled bay. The house had big windows overlooking shaggy bougainvillea bushes. There were hardly any studs in the frame and the whole house had shaken when the dog ran through it.

  The girl’s boyfriend’s last name was Chester and everyone called him that. He was in his mid-thirties. The girl realized she was no kid herself. She was five years younger than he was. Chester favored trousers with legs of different colors and wore sunglasses the color of champagne bottles. He wore them day and night like a blind man. Chester had a catamaran. He loved to cook. “It’s just another way to cook eggs,” he’d say as he produced staggeringly delicious blintzes on Sunday morning. Chester had a writing dentist who had serviced the Weathermen in college. Chester had wide shoulders, great hands and one broken marriage on which he didn’t owe a dime.

  “You have fallen into the pie,” the girl’s friends told her.

  Three days before the shepherd had drowned, Chester had asked the girl to marry him. They had known each other almost a year. “I love you,” he said, “let’s get married.” They had taken a Quaalude and gone to bed. That had been three weeks and three days ago. They were going to be married in four days. Time is breath, the girl thought.

  The girl sat on a rusted glider with faded cushions and drank bourbon from a glass printed with orange suns and pink flamingos. She wore skimpy flowered shorts and a black T-shirt. Tears ran down her face.

  The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, “Do you love me?” he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight.

  The shepherd had been five years old when he drowned. The girl had had him since he was two months old. She had bought him from a breeder in Miami, a man who had once been a priest. The girl’s shepherd came from a litter of five with excellent bloodlines. The mother was graceful and friendly, the father more solemn and alert. The breeder who had once been a priest made the girl spend several minutes alone with each puppy and asked her a great many questions about herself. The girl didn’t know what she was doing actually. She had never thought about herself much. When she had finally selected her puppy, she sat in the kitchen with the breeder and drank a Pepsi. The puppy stumbled around her feet, nibbling at the laces of her sneakers. The breeder smoked and talked to the girl with a great deal of assurance. The girl had been quite in awe of him.

  He said, “We are all asleep and dreaming, you know. If we could ever actually comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out.”

  The girl nodded and sipped her warm Pepsi. She was embarrassed. People would sometimes speak to her in this way, in this intimate, alarming way as though she were passionate or thoughtful or well-read. The puppy smelled wonderful. She picked him up and held him.

  “We deceive ourselves. All we do is dream. Good dreams, bad dreams …”

  “The ways that others see us is our life,” the girl said.

  “Yes!” the breeder exclaimed.

  The girl sat slowly moving on the glider. She imagined herself standing laughing, younger and much nicer, the shepherd leaping into her arms. Her head buzzed and rustled. The bourbon bobbed around the flamingo’s lowered head on the gaudy glass. She stood up and walked from one end of the porch to the other. The shepherd’s drowned weight in her arms had been a terrible thing, a terrible thing. She and Chester were both dressed rather elaborately because they had just returned from dinner with two friends, a stockbroker and his girl friend, an art dealer. The art dealer was very thin and very blond. There were fine blond hairs on her face. The small restaurant where they ate appeared much larger than it was by its use of mirrored walls. The girl watched the four of them eating and drinking in the mirrors. The stockbroker spoke of money, of what he could do for his friends. “I love my work,” he said.

  “The art I handle,” his girl friend said, “is intended as a stimulus for discussion. In no way is it to be taken as an aesthetic product.”

  As the evening wore on, the girl friend became quite drunk. She had a large repertoire of light-bulb jokes.

  The girl had asked the woman for her untouched steak tournedos. The waiter had wrapped it for her in aluminum foil, the foil twisted into the shape of a swan. The girl remembered carrying the meat into the house for the shepherd and seeing the torn window screen. She remembered feeling the stillness in her house as it flowed into her eyes.

  The girl looked at the Gulf. It was a dazzling day with no surf. The beach was deserted. The serious tanners were in tanning parlors, bronzing evenly beneath sun lamps, saving time.

  The girl wished the moment were still to come, that she were there, then, waiting, her empty arms outstretched, saying, “Do you love me?” Dogs hear sounds that we cannot, thought the girl. Dogs hear callings.

  Chester had dug a deep square hole beneath the largest of the bougainvillea bushes and the girl had laid her dog down into it.

  Their pale clothes became dirty from the drowned dog’s coat. The girl had thrown her dress away. Chester had sent his suit to the dry cleaners.

  Chester liked the dog, but it was the girl’s dog. A dog can only belong to one person. When Chester and the girl made love in her house, or when the girl was out for the evening, she kept the shepherd inside, closed up on a small porch with high screened windows. He had taken to leaping out of his pen, a clearing enclosed with cyclone fencing and equipped with old tires. It was supposed to be his playground, his exercise area and keep away boredom and loneliness when the girl was not with him. It was a tall fence, but the shepherd had found a way over it. He had escaped, again and again, so the girl had begun locking him up in the small porch room. The girl had never witnessed his escape, from either of these places, but she imagined him leaping, gathering himself and plunging upward. He could leap so high—there was such lightness in him, such faith in the leaping.

  On the beach, at Chester’s, the waves glittered so with light, the girl could not bear to look at them. She finished the bourbon, took the empty glass to the kitchen and put it in the sink.

  When the girl and the shepherd had first begun their life together, they had lived around Mile 47 in the Florida Keys. The girl worked in a small marine laboratory there. Her life was purely her own and the dog’s. Life seemed slow and joyous and remembering those days, the girl felt that she had been on the brink of something extraordinary. She remembered the shep
herd, his exuberance, energy, dignity. She remembered the shepherd and remembered being, herself, good. She had been capable of living another life then. She lived aware of happiness.

  The girl pushed her hands through her hair. The Gulf seemed to stick in her throat.

  There had been an abundance of holy things then. Once the world had been promising. But there had been a disappearance of holy things.

  A friend of Chester’s had suggested hypnotism. He had been quite enthusiastic about it. The girl would have a few sessions with this hypnotist that he knew, and she would forget the dog. Not forget exactly, rather, certain connections would not be made. The girl would no longer recall the dog in the context of her grief. The hypnotist had had great success with smokers.

  Tonight they were going to have dinner with this man and his wife. The girl couldn’t bear the thought of it. They would talk and talk. They would talk about real estate and hypnotism and coke and Cancún. All of Chester’s friends loved Cancun. Tonight, they would go to a restaurant which had recently become notorious when an elderly woman had died from burns received when the cherries jubilee she was being served set fire to her dress. They would all order flaming desserts. They would go dancing afterwards.

  Animals are closer to God than we, the girl thought, but they are lost to him. Her arms felt heavy. The sun was huge, moving ponderously toward the horizon. People were gathering on the beach to watch it go down. They were playing their radios. When the sun touched the horizon, it took three minutes before it disappeared. An animal can live for three minutes without air. It had taken the shepherd three minutes to die after however long he had been swimming in the deep water off the smooth seawall. The girl remembered walking into the house with the meat wrapped in the foil in the shape of a swan, and seeing the broken screen. The house was full of mosquitoes. Chester put some soft ice in a glass and poured a nightcap. Chester always looked out of place in the girl’s house. The house wasn’t worth anything, it was the land that was valuable. The girl went outside, calling, past the empty pen, calling, down to the bay, seeing the lights of the better houses along the seawall. A neighbor had called the sheriff’s department and the lights from the deputy’s car shone on the ground on the dark dog.