by Elaine Ford
“Pain’s bad today, right in the small of my back.”
“I’m sorry, Gam. Did you remember to take your pills?”
Of course she didn’t take them. The pills made her dizzy, Ethel didn’t know why Amy kept forgetting that. Amy’s long-suffering expression was like a dose of gall to her, smile as false as a three-dollar bill. When the girl opened her mouth she couldn’t help showing the chipped front tooth. Ethel did not doubt that man gave it to her, the only thing he would ever give her.
The old woman set the cup down, rattling it dangerously in its saucer, and started to sort through cans and boxes with her arthritic claw of a hand. “I saw your husband has an ad in the paper,” Gam said.
Amy sat at the table with her cup, untied her shoes, and pulled them from her feet.
“It’s not about dogs for once. Bicycle. Garden tools. Fishing gear. I don’t remember what-all else. Must be hard up for cash.”
Always, Amy thought. Always.
“That wouldn’t be the bicycle you stole from the shed, would it?”
“It was my bike. Gapp gave it to me.”
“Not to run away on, he didn’t give it to you for that.”
“It’s old and rusty.”
Ethel remembered unlocking Amy’s door and finding torn pieces of screen littering the floor, the ruined manicure scissors open beside them, the room swarming with mosquitoes. “Wouldn’t be old and rusty if you’d taken care of it.”
“That’s like saying you wouldn’t have rheumatism if you’d taken care of your joints.”
Gam lifted the big black cane and brought it down hard on Amy’s forearm. The cup flew out of Amy’s hand and crashed against the stove, breaking into four or five pieces. Amy was so surprised that for a moment all she could do was stare at the brownish liquid dripping off the oven door onto the floor. The old woman calmly resumed checking off the items on the table against her list. If it hadn’t been for the pain in her arm and the broken cup on the floor, Amy almost would not have believed it happened. Then Gam muttered, “Time you learned to keep a civil tongue in your head.”
Amy stood. Her hands were shaking. She said, “Gam, I’m not a little girl. I’m twenty years old, a married woman.”
“Twenty years old and stuck like a fly in a web.”
Amy cleaned up the coffee and broken china, then set about preparing her grandmother’s supper.
More litters of pups were born and then, after eight or ten weeks, sold through classified ads in the paper. Black Labs, excellent bloodlines, all shots, wormed. Amy never got used to the expense involved in the raising of pedigreed dogs: stud fees, show fees, vet bills, propane gas to heat the kennels, kibble by the hundred-pound bag. Each new statement that appeared in the mail made sweat collect in her armpits as she tried to figure out which creditor could be stalled a month or two, which corner cut. She’d get a sick headache and swallow so many aspirin she imagined them corroding her stomach lining, but Jack seemed indifferent to the invoices collecting in a pile on the kitchen counter. Apparently he assumed that God would provide. Or failing that, Amy.
One year a virus wiped out two entire litters, except for an ugly runt that Jack never found a buyer for. Clumsy and fawning, the animal hung around in the back kennel, a daily reminder of their bad luck. Another year a young bitch Jack paid a thousand dollars for developed a brain tumor and had to be put down. All that money gone, might just as well have flung it into the dustbin, Amy thought, put it out with the trash.
Neither of them ever mentioned it, but the plain truth was that without Amy’s job to pay the mortgage and the electricity and fuel bills, buy the groceries, they would have no home. They’d starve.
Often Jack had terrible dreams, which he refused to talk about. As far as he was concerned, she’d imagined the screams that woke her in the night. He’d push the bedcovers back and get up. She’d hear the toilet flush, the kitchen door open and close, footsteps outside crunching dead grass. She didn’t know whether he was checking on the dogs, smoking a cigarette, or just looking at the stars hanging over the marsh. Still inside his war dream maybe, too scary and dark a place for her to go.
Of course, he was a solitary, private person. She’d loved that about him, because it made her special that he’d allowed her into his life. Now, though, she wondered why he had no friends, scarcely left the place except to exhibit the dogs in what she’d come to realize were third-rate backwater shows. Even a blue ribbon didn’t mean much, wouldn’t result in more sales or higher prices.
Spring, just past mud season. Amy raised the kitchen window back of the sink and smelled the mingled odors of dog and the paper mill upriver. Days like this one—damp, low cloud cover—held the poisonous, acrid stench close to the soil. Near the edge of the yard was a granite boulder the size of a car. It just sat there for no reason, abandoned during the last ice age, too huge and heavy for anyone to think of moving. “Imagine how long that rock’s been here,” she’d said the day Jack brought her here to show off his new property. Seventeen years old she was.
“And how long it will be here after we’re gone,” he’d replied, his hand lightly caressing the back of her neck. Her hands in dishwater, she shut her eyes, remembering. In no time they’d been inside the empty house, lying on the bare, hard living room floor, and she’d felt for the first time the jagged war scar on his back. He’d hurt her, but she hadn’t cared. She’d wanted him so much.
Now she heard him outside in the dooryard, stamping his feet on the rubber mat, opening the storm door, pulling off his work boots, slinging his keys onto the table. She dipped a plate into the dishpan and rubbed it with the sponge. Amy always took care of the breakfast dishes before going to work, not only washing them but drying them and putting them away. It was one of the many things about her that baffled Jack.
“Vicky’s gimpy this morning,” he said, unwinding the red strip of cellophane from a fresh pack of cigarettes. Victory, the pick of Rose of Tralee’s last litter, six months old now.
“It’s not her hip, is it?”
“She’s walking like she has a thorn or something in her left hind paw, but I couldn’t see anything. Maybe you’d take a look.”
She’d be late for work, but she told him she would. It was going to be a bad day, anyway. She had on brown slacks and a yellow pullover that was pilling under the arms, ugly as sin, but too good yet to get rid of. All she had to make her lunch out of was the heel of a block of processed cheese she’d bought on sale. Jack hadn’t cared for it, so she’d ended up eating most of it herself. The rotten-egg smell from the mill would linger in the office all day, putting everyone in a foul mood. All right, admit it, she was feeling sorry for herself. But give her credit for not whining out loud, at least.
Amy put the last dish on the drain board and as she turned to get a towel from the rack, she saw him sitting at the table. Just sitting, doing nothing.
She left the towel on the rack, pulled a chair away from the table, its legs scraping harshly over the asphalt-tile floor, and sat across from him. He looked at her, mildly surprised, his green eyes squinting in the light from the window behind her back. He lit a cigarette while he waited for her to say whatever she was going to say.
“Jack, I want a baby,” she told him. “It’s time, past time.”
Behind him she could see the wall of bundled insulation, naked and now fraying because he’d never put the plasterboard back up after the brief foray into home improvement soon after they’d moved in. She hadn’t once nagged about the plasterboard, because she’d hear her grandmother’s voice in her own.
“You’re the one pays the bills,” Jack said. “You know how much is left in the bank at the end of the month.” They’d been through all this before, a million times it seemed like. What if there weren’t so many dogs? she’d say. If we had only half as many to feed, we’d have enough for a baby, more than enough. Well maybe so, but how
did she think he was going to develop a good breeding stock if he sold half of it off? It would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg, before it even laid one goddamn egg. Besides, babies didn’t stay little. Before you knew it they were needing braces on their teeth, ten-speed bicycles. Demanding to be taken to Disney World.
Sometimes Jack thought about how much easier it would be to forget about breeding the best damn Labrador retriever the world has ever seen, just get in the pickup and head out. Stay for a while with his brother Lee in LA, maybe. He still had that old guitar around somewhere, he thought, unless they’d sold it in one of their yard sales. “What happened to Lee’s guitar?” he asked.
“Lee’s guitar! What has Lee’s guitar got to do with this?” Amy knotted her hands together under the table. “Listen, Jack. Every damn bitch on the place has litter after litter. Except me.”
“You aren’t making sense,” he said. “Pups bring in money. Babies don’t.”
“But pups don’t bring in enough money, do they? So I have to type contracts and wills and divorce petitions until my fingers fall off. Until I croak.”
“Maybe next year.”
“No, Jack. This year. Now. Or I’m going to leave.”
He exhaled, a long thin stream of smoke that trembled slightly in the draft of air from the window and then wrapped itself around the overhead light fixture. Inside the frosted glass were the carcasses of flies that had somehow found their way in there in summers past, though he knew how tight the globe was screwed into the metal base, how tight the base was jammed against the ceiling.
In truth it wasn’t just a baby Amy craved. Or maybe not a baby at all, not really, not any more. She felt crazy with restlessness, with a yearning she didn’t know how to deal with. “You don’t believe I’d leave, do you?”
“Where would you go?”
The voice he used was one in which he might ask if it was going to rain today or whether she’d remembered to gas up the truck. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
“What about Vicky’s paw?”
“You’d just have to manage it yourself.”
He knocked ash into a saucer. If he stayed cool, he thought, she’d calm down and admit to herself the foolishness of leaving. Maybe he could even laugh her out of it. “Better not go to your grandmother’s house,” he said. “The old witch would drive you nuts.”
Amy got up and went to the sink, stared out the window. She imagined the boulder suddenly starting to move, flattening the wild azaleas that grew there, picking up speed as it rolled down the slope toward the house. The picture in her head was so vivid that for a moment she stood with her hands gripping the edge of the sink, bracing herself for the crash.
Amy took the first apartment she looked at, the cheapest advertised in the paper—a furnished attic efficiency in Bangor, near the old gas works. It had a low, pitched ceiling and on three walls beige wallpaper stained by roof leaks. Crammed against the back wall were a stove, a tinny icebox, and a sink. The landlord had stowed the toilet behind a particleboard partition so you couldn’t see it, but she’d always hear it, the water in the tank endlessly dribbling.
The narrow, dark steps reminded her of the steps to Jack’s room on Cobb Street, over the thrift store. If only she hadn’t gone up those steps. If only she’d picked up the change and ballpoint pens from the sidewalk and walked back home and left him be.
She didn’t give Jack her new address, or anybody else in Holland, and she didn’t tell her grandmother that she’d left her husband. Why listen to the old woman crow. “About time you came to your senses,” or “I’m not one to say I told you so, but . . . ” She quit typing for Ewell Dyer and took the GED exam and passed it. Then she found another position, in an insurance office on Exchange Street. For that job she had to learn to use a computer, but after the first few weeks she’d have been able to run the programs in her sleep. She bought a car, a serviceable hatchback with some body rust but low mileage for the price and reasonable monthly payments.
Sometimes she went out to lunch with another girl who worked in the office, who’d recently broken up with her boyfriend and was eager to have someone to unload her troubles on. A few times Amy was asked out on dates. One of the men, an adjuster, took her to a bar and ordered whisky sours. She drank half of hers and felt her face grow numb. Another man, who worked in a discount shoe store, talked to her about leather uppers over a meal of sweet and sour pork and shrimp fried rice. A third took her to a free movie at the business college and afterward tried to unbutton her blouse in his van. She wore her mother’s gold earrings on these dates, but none of the men asked her out again. She wasn’t sorry.
Spring turned to summer and summer to fall. She thought about Jack, wondering how he was managing without her, without her paycheck. Perhaps the rapidly dwindling bank account had forced him to look for work. Or perhaps he’d found someone else to pay his bills.
Often in her mind she’d get into the hatchback and cross the city, picking up Route 239 east of the old bridge. After eleven miles she’d bear right at the country store with the Getchell’s ice chest out front and the sign in the window advertising Taylor’s worms and crawlers for sale, then head out Gooseneck Road. Another six winding miles past some down-at-heels trailers and collapsing barns, fields with goldenrod blooming in them, acres of woods, an old granite quarry called Devil’s Hole because so many kids have drowned in it, some more fields, and a marsh where alders and winterberries grow. Then the road stops being paved.
You wouldn’t notice the house unless you were looking for it, a poky cape set back from the road, near a spindly growth of spruce and white pine. Attached to a chain-link cage next to the house is a weathered sign: J. Gilley. Labrador Retrievers. Pedigreed. AKC Registered. And under that, hand-lettered on raw plywood: Dogs boarded. Pet supplies. Amy hears dogs barking behind the house. The one Lab she can see, in the first run, is a pup, born since the spring.
There’s something a little creepy about the place. Maybe it’s the half-dead trees, some of which have knots of fuzzy moss adhering to naked branches. Or the mournfully aimless barking, or the shades pulled in the windows.
The concrete path is crumbling, with weeds forcing their way up through the cracks. What little grass there is between the side of the house and the woods needs cutting. The smell of dog smothers everything. The pup has risen to its haunches and gazes at her as she knocks on the door frame.
After a while a man opens the inner door. Through the screen she sees that he’s got a day’s growth of stubble on his jaw, which seems to have gone somewhat slack. As she anticipated, he doesn’t recognize the person at the door. “Yes?” he says.
She wonders what to say. Finally, as he’s about to close the door on her, she tells him, “I came about the ad in the paper.”
“Wait a minute.”
He shuts the door in her face, leaving her to stand on the stoop. Then he reappears, a short leash in his hand. He leads her around the house to the rear, where there are five or six more chain-link dog runs, some sheds and outhouses, a little weed-choked garden plot, and a granite boulder that has lichen growing in its crevices. All the dogs—more than twenty of them—are now barking and hurling themselves against the fencing, obviously hot to get at her and rip her throat open. They don’t recognize her, either. She glances back at the house, almost expecting to see a young woman with a round face and flushed cheeks and light wispy hair and a chipped front tooth staring at the stranger who is talking to her husband, but all the windows have their shades pulled down to the sills.
Jack is oblivious to the racket. He raises the latch on one of the cage doors and opens it just enough for a bitch to squeeze through. She’s smaller than the others, but not a puppy. As he’s clipping the leash to the chain around her neck, he begins to talk about her. “She’s not a show dog,” he says, “I’ll be straight with you. You wouldn’t want to breed her b
ecause she’s got a genetic fault.” He pauses, his luminous green eyes on the dog. “I’m not sure where it came from—must be some quirk in the dam’s bloodline.”
“A throwback?” Amy asks.
He shrugs. “Not bad enough to cripple her, you understand, but she can go a tad lame in wet weather. You have to take care to look for fractures.”
He’s scratching the dog’s head and fondling her ears, and her eyes become slits in pleasure. “A good house dog, though, if you know how to handle her.”
Tentatively, Amy pats the dog between her ears. The bitch lifts her head, nudging it into Amy’s hand. The nap of the fur is so short and smooth Amy’s aware of the bony ridge of the dog’s skull just beneath it.
“If you’re interested, I can make you a deal. Frankly, I’m a little pressed for cash right now. I said one-fifty in the ad, and she’s actually worth at least two, but I’ll let her go for a hundred. A check’s okay if you don’t have the cash.”
The bitch begins to lick Amy’s hand and she backs off from the dog, puts her hand in her pocket. “I’m not sure,” she says.
“Better make your mind up pretty fast. She won’t hang around long at that price.”
Now the bitch has caught wind of something in a nearby tree, a squirrel maybe. She strains at the leash in Jack’s hand, her neck pinched by the choke collar, her toenails scrabbling in the dirt.
“You seem kind of familiar,” he says to Amy. “You been here before?”
The plastic film bag on her grandmother’s newly dry-cleaned drapes read: WARNING: To avoid danger of suffocation keep away from babies and small children. This bag is not a toy. Amy ripped the bag from the hangers over which the curtains were folded and knotted it several times and threw it into the wastebasket. She began to jab the hooks into the strip of buckram behind the pleats. From the sun porch, which received no sun because of the cedars that hovered over the house, came her grandmother’s snores. With any luck Amy would have the curtains hung by the time Gam arose from her nap.