The dog had been his for a week when Montana Bob found him out. Sid was in the Mint having a happy-hour beer before heading home and he’d left the dog in the truck. He’d taken to bringing the dog to work with him so he could let it out to run at lunch. Sid had his back to the door, but as soon as the two men came in he had a bad feeling. They sat right next to him, one on each side. Plenty of stools all up and down the bar, but they came and crowded in on him. The big one wore a sweat-stained summer Stetson with a ragged rooster-pheasant tail feather sticking out of the hatband. His hair was shaggy and flared out from the hat brim. He wore a leather vest with nothing underneath save a mangy pelt of thick black hair. His companion was considerably smaller and extremely fair-skinned, nearly bald except for a few blond strands grown long on one side and then combed over. He wore a button-up oxford shirt and corduroy pants. Sperry Top-Siders. On his belt was a large knife in a sheath, its handle made of a pale-yellow plastic that was supposed to look like bone. They ordered beers, and when the beers arrived the big man in the hat drank deeply and then leaned toward Sid, a pale scum of suds covering his upper lip.
“I don’t believe in beating the bush.”
Sid picked at a loose corner on the label of his bottle of beer. He thought about bolting, just getting up like he was going to make his way to the bathroom and then sliding out the back.
“I don’t beat the bush, so I’m going to get right down to the tacks. I believe I recognize a familiar dog in that blue Chevy out front, and also, since you’re about the only one in here, I figure that’s your vehicle, so I figure that I’ll need to ask you where you happened to come across that dog.”
The man pushed his hat back on his head and swivelled on his stool to face Sid. He smiled.
“Also, I’m Montana Bob.” He extended his hand—which Sid shook, not knowing what else to do—and nodded toward his companion, seated on Sid’s other side.
“And that’s Charlie Chaplin. Shake his hand.”
Sid turned and shook Charlie Chaplin’s pale proffered hand.
“I’m a local businessman, and Charlie Chaplin is my accountant. Also, he provides counsel to me in matters of legal concern.”
Sid considered Charlie Chaplin, and when their eyes met he felt something skittering and cold move down his spine. Montana Bob was the bigger man, menacing even, with large bare arms and small pieces of pointed silver at the tips of his boots, but it was this one, small and waxen and pale, who made Sid shift uncomfortably.
Sid found himself speaking too quickly, his voice high.
“I picked up that dog at the shelter. Bought and paid for. Got him his shots—rabies, distemper, all that. I got the paperwork in the truck. They said at the shelter that he was a canine of misfortunate past. Meaning his old owner used to stomp him. Kind of a mutt, but he seems loyal. Likes to fetch the tennis ball. My kids are crazy about him.”
Montana Bob nodded as Sid spoke. Charlie Chaplin nodded, too. Montana Bob motioned the bartender down to them and ordered another beer for himself and Charlie Chaplin.
“Two more. Also, a large pitcher of ice water. No ice.”
The bartender went away, and Montana Bob spoke to Sid’s reflection in the mirrored bar back.
“Likes to fetch the tennis ball, does he? Well, I’ll be. Did you know that that dog was given to me by a Frenchman? The dog is a French Brittany spaniel and he comes from France. Born in France of royal French Brittany stock. Also, that dog was a gift from a French count. Guy St. Vrain made me a present of that dog when it was just a pup, in payment for services rendered by yours truly. You don’t know Guy St. Vrain, but that doesn’t matter. That’s how he likes it. He’s in the movie business. Also, he’s in the dog business.”
The bartender came with the pitcher of water, and Montana Bob took off his hat and set it on the bar top. He poured half the pitcher into the hat and then replaced it on his head, the water streaming down his face and neck, matting the thick glossy hair on his chest.
“You stole my fucking dog.” He was still looking at Sid through his reflection in the bar mirror. “Also, I had a hot and dusty day out on the trail, and I come here for a drink only to find my possessions in someone else’s egg basket.”
In the mirror, Sid saw his own hands go up, saw his shoulders shrug.
“Got it at the shelter. I don’t know anything about any of this.”
He slid from the stool and caught the bartender’s eye.
“I’ll take one more. Be right back. Gotta take a leak.”
In the bathroom, he ran the water and splashed some on his face. He had his keys in his hand when he hit the door, and then he was out in the last evening rays of sun, firing the truck, the dog standing anxiously with its front paws on the dash. Sid drove without looking back. He drove all the way down the river road and let the dog out. He walked a path through the thickets of tamarisk and Russian olive, and when he stopped the dog perched delicately at the water’s edge, standing on a rock, lapping up the muddy red water.
Before Sid had burst through the bar doors to start his truck, he’d glimpsed the barroom. Montana Bob sitting astride his stool like a swayback steed. Charlie Chaplin standing in front of the jukebox, flipping the disks as if looking for a particular track, a song whose name he couldn’t remember or whose tune existed solely in his head.
Sid had no clear idea where he was running. It was a strange mode of navigation, more like divination, taking the smoothest path through a shattered Martian nightscape of jumbled rock. If he turned, he could still see the shafts of light from his pursuers’ A.T.V., and he thought about circling back toward town. The problem was the dog. Sid would have to cut a wide path around to keep the dog from straying close to the lights, and, if the dog was captured, then what was the point? Another thought: might the dog return to its former owner willingly? Sid was unsure. He kept running. The dog spooked a small herd of mule deer out of a ragged stand of juniper and they bounded past him, covering great lengths of ground with each leap, their forms backlit against the sky now lightening in the east. Sid had never seen desert deer this close before. At the apex of each jump they seemed to hang, suspended, vaguely avian, a group of prehistoric near-birds not quite suited to life on land, not quite comfortable with their wings’ ability to keep them aloft. Just then, he had the thought that if he could keep going until the sun came up he might be O.K.
After the incident at the bar, he had broken down and called her. She hadn’t answered, and he’d left a message, hating the sound of his voice. Tinny with the fear he’d wanted her to feel. I’m not calling to try and get you to come back and be mine again. I’m just calling to tell you that if no one ever sees me around anymore it’s because I ran afoul of some bad people in a matter concerning a dog. And I never meant for you to grow against me like you did. That’s it. He hung up in self-loathing. He folded an old blanket on the floor at the end of his bed for the dog, and when the knock on the door came—at two in the morning, three days after Montana Bob had called him out in the Mint—Sid couldn’t exactly say that he hadn’t been expecting it. For a brief moment he knew the relief of the fugitive who finally feels the handcuffs encircle his wrists.
Montana Bob spoke to him from the other side of the door, his words just barely whiskey-softened.
“You, sir, are in possession of my royal French canine. Charlie Chaplin and myself come to you as missionaries. Also, as pilgrims and crusaders.”
By the time Montana Bob kicked in the flimsy trailer door, Sid had already slammed out the back, catching Charlie Chaplin off guard. The accountant was standing on the trailer’s rickety back porch, and the door handle hit him in the midsection, doubling him over. Sid ran down the sloping trailer-court drive and through his neighbors’ weed-choked yards, down the alley, across the dead main street, and through the train yard, his bare toes curling around the cold iron track as he gathered himself to hurdle over the crushed-granite rail bed. It wasn’t until he reached the barren lots at the base of the rimrock’s up
slope that he realized the dog was running beside him, occasionally stopping to lift its leg on a rock or a clump of sagebrush. Back toward the road, Sid could see the lights of an A.T.V. coming fast. He waited until he could make out the shape of Montana Bob’s hat and the pale, bare arms of Charlie Chaplin wrapped around his midsection—and then he started scrabbling his way up the slope, the dog flowing effortlessly through the rock above him.
REPERCUSSION
A subscriber to the Times who lives up in Westchester spent a good part of last year training his Labrador retriever to bound down to the open tube beside the mailbox in front of his house and fetch the paper back to the front door. When the newspaper strike set in, the retriever kept looking for the Times, and in a couple of days he became morose at his failure to find it. Finally, the subscriber hit upon a scheme to cheer up his dog. Each evening, he decided, he would go down into his cellar, where he has a huge stack of Timeses, pick up an old copy, and sneak down to the open tube with it. The plan has worked fine. The Labrador is still busy with his retrieving. | 1965 |
She was a small woman, so pale that the desert hurt her in ways that Sid would never fully understand. Like Sid, she was a nude sleeper. When he found this out it became one of those happy little intersections of shared personality, the slow accumulation of which is love. With her, it was years of nights spent bare back to bare chest. Sometimes, when it was hot, they woke up and had to peel themselves apart, their tangled limbs stuck together like the fleshy segments of some strange misshapen fruit.
They were alike in other ways as well, and at one time these things had seemed natural and unaffected, important even. They both liked the river. Sid got inner tubes from the tire store, and when the heat got unbearable they would float, keeping their beer cool in a mesh bag trailing in the river behind them. And, if she never fully came to love the desert, Sid was pretty sure she came to understand why he did. Once, he took her up to see the hoodoos in Goblin Valley. It was midnight during a full moon, and they were half-drunk and a little high. They played tag and hide-and-seek around the hulking sandstone formations, laughing, hooting, and shrieking, the sounds careening, giving voice to the rocks themselves.
Things were good this way for a long time, and then one night he woke to the sound of her crying in the bathroom. The next night she came to bed in one of his T-shirts and a pair of boxer shorts. And the next night Sid slept alone.
As he ran Sid could see her, laid out on their bed, a night-blooming moonflower, her white limbs like petals unfolding, finally, in the absence of light. He remembered their house, how the door latch was broken and the wind would blow the door open if they didn’t remember to throw the bolt. They’d be sitting in the little dining room, eating dinner, the table crowded with mismatched cups and plates and silverware, and all of a sudden the door would swing open. She’d flinch, as if someone were breaking in on them, uninvited. Sid used to tease her about it, but now he found himself wondering who exactly it was she thought was coming unannounced into their home. Who was the man with his hand on the doorknob, ready to push his way into their lives?
Sid ran and the rocks cut him; the piñon pines clutched and tore at him. Dried sweat crusted his bare torso and thighs, and any moment of rest brought cramps, the muscles of his legs twitching and popping of their own accord. He found himself moving his cracked lips, making strange utterances with each painful footfall, the desert a silent observer, an expressionless juror to whom he tried to make his plea. I ran afoul of some bad people in a matter concerning a dog. Irana foul. Iranafoul. I ran, a foul?
It sounded melodramatic and desperate, a wild call for attention. Better to leave the dog out of it. Get right to the point.
Since we dissolved I’ve been a spectre running blind and naked in the desert. Is that melodramatic? Well, that’s what is happening to me now.
He imagined driving to their old house and stepping onto the porch. She’d be alone and would come out to meet him in one of the sundresses she always wore in the hot months, the fabric like gauze, like a soft bandage laid over healing flesh. She’d offer him a cool drink and they’d sit in the shade, and the words, all the right ones, would flow from him, an upwelling, an eruption of cleansing language.
Remember when we went way up north that winter and rented the cabin and there was a hot spring not too far away? We’d go out at night and shiver down the path to the water and slip into the warmth, like pulling a hot sheet around us. My feet in the sulfur-smelling mud of the pool, your legs twined around mine like white, earth-seeking roots. Remember that? The way the deer would come down when it got really cold just to stand in the steam rising up from the water? And then the day we left for home? How cold it was? We went outside and our eyes started to freeze at the corners and you had never seen anything like it and took a picture of me standing next to a thermometer that was bottomed out at forty below. In that picture I’m standing on the cabin porch, and behind me the river is frozen solid, or so it seems.
Here Sid imagined moving in a little closer, putting his work-roughened hand on her smooth one.
I’ve been thinking about that picture and that river on the coldest day of the year. Underneath that ice, the river was still moving. Forty below, but even then the water closest to the riverbed was moving. It’s like a river exists in defiance, or has a secret life. Everything above is frozen and stiff, but down below it moves along, liquid over the rocks, as though nothing happening on the surface mattered. On a day like this, you could walk across the river as if you were crossing the street. But, just below that shell, the current would be flowing. That is my love for you.
And that would be it. She’d come with him, push up next to him on the bench seat of his pickup, and he’d drive with the windows down, her hair blowing into his face and mouth and eyes. Dust and the scent of her shampoo in his nose. They’d pick up right where they’d left off.
He was moving up a dry creek bed, shuffling through the soft red sand deposited by spring floods in years past, when he got the feeling that the creek wasn’t dry after all, that he was splashing through an ankle-deep current of muddy red water. He was thirsty. Christ, was he thirsty. But when he scooped a great double handful of water up to his cracked lips it turned back to sand and fell through his fingers. This seemed a particularly cruel joke, and he had thoughts of finding a dark place to curl up inside, a rock for a pillow and a soft blanket of sand. But there was the matter of the dog, the matter of Charlie Chaplin’s vacuous eyes and his pistol, which, in Sid’s mind, had achieved magnificent proportions. Charlie Chaplin was riding it like an evil old mare with cracked hooves and a faded brand. It was the gun itself in pursuit, half horse, half instrument of percussion and death. A spavined nag whose blued flanks were singed and smoking.
At first, running on the sand was deliriously comfortable, the soft ground like an answered prayer for the raw soles of Sid’s feet. But then the farther he went the harder it became, the sand shifting and giving way under his feet, so that each stride required more effort from his already screaming calves.
When the twisting and turning of the creek bed became unbearable, Sid clambered out onto the exposed rock. From this vantage point, he watched the now greatly diminished moon drift down toward the far black horizon like a pale phosphorus match head broken off in the striking. If Montana Bob and Charlie Chaplin were still in pursuit, he had no evidence of it. In fact, some small dislodged part of him was unsure that they had ever existed. Sid couldn’t see the dog most of the time. Sometimes he forgot about it altogether. It ran ahead, silent and unperturbed as the earth itself.
It was a loud dawn. Sid had never seen or heard anything quite like it, the sun breaking the horizon line with a sound like a dull knife ripping a sheet. He was walking stiffly now, moving his arms in great circles, slapping his thighs and torso to fend off the cold. He looked down and for the first time could see himself clearly, the angry red whip welts on his calves from branches, the purple cracked toenails and raised blue lines of en
gorged veins and capillaries, over everything a grimy patina of sweat crust and desert dust and leaking blood.
He crested a small hill where, on the back side of the slope, there was a rusted stock tank fed by a leaning windmill that rose out of a clump of acacia. He didn’t believe in the stock tank. It was like that river of muddy water, a thing that would dry up and slip through his fingers. He sat on a rock and looked. The windmill was missing some slats, and he knew that there was no water in the tank. This was a definite truth, and Sid felt it like gravity. After a while the dog emerged from a tangle of sagebrush and, with no fanfare, proceeded to lap from the tank, its tail fanning slightly in a breeze that did not reach Sid.
Down the slope in jerks, his muscles and ligaments tightened like catgut tennis-racquet cord. Sid submerged his entire head, eyes wide open, into the water, metallic-tasting, gelid with the flavor of the past night. The bottom of the tank was lined with a slick layer of electric-green algae over which a single orange carp hovered, blimplike. Sid wanted to get in, to live with this carp alone in this desert within a desert. But the water was cold, and he knew that the carp did not want him. He drank for so long that points of black began to form at the edges of his vision, small black-legged forms like water striders skating the clear pool of his periphery. He broke for air and collapsed with his back against the tank, the rivets pressing into his flesh. From this position he could see into the twisted inner workings of the windmill, the busted-spring parts, the pieces held together by coils of baling wire. The dog was moving around the base of the acacia trees, its snout plowing last year’s dead grass, the fur ends around its paws just slightly reddened by the touch of the desert rock. Above the dog, in the twisting acacia branches, Sid could make out two sparrows, dead and skewered on thorns.
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 9