Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  So the river had remained much as God had made it. Man figured little in its destiny. And on this early morning, Bright Birdsong was glad that, in this one instance, Dorsey Bascombe had not gotten his way.

  There was the river. And there was new sun. She stood on the front porch of the camp house, feeling the first warmth of the new sun peeking just over the tops of the trees at the edge of the clearing and bathing the porch with soft golden light. She was clad only in her slip, her feet bare. She raised her arms slowly, held them outstretched toward the sun like some pagan at worship, felt the warmth flooding her, reaching down into the soft secret places. She thought of Hosanna with a smile. New sun got power to heal and clean.

  The clearing began to waken from its cool grayness. Birds chattered in the trees, arguing over breakfast. Two squirrels chased madly around the trunk of a gnarled oak and then one of them zipped into the green bosom of the upper branches and sat chattering, unseen. Behind the house, the river slid like a broad green snake with just the faintest of sighs, an undercurrent to the morning. A quiet splash at its edge. The heron, feeding. Bright’s stomach rumbled.

  “What are you doing?” Jimbo asked from the doorway at her back.

  She didn’t turn around. “Energizing.”

  “Why are you standing out here in your gilhoolies?”

  Bright lowered her arms. “My what?”

  “Gilhoolies. That’s what Rupert calls underwear.”

  She turned to him now. “And what’s that you’re wearing, buster?”

  His hair was askew, eyes puffy from sleep. He wore only white jockey shorts. He looked down at himself, grinned self-consciously. “Gilhoolies.”

  “Want to go for a swim?”

  He shrugged. “I reckon.” Three days with his dotty old grandmother, and nothing seems to surprise him anymore. It is progress.

  They splashed about at the edge of the water, Bright holding her slip up just above her knees, wading about in the sandy shallows and scattering minnows with her feet. Jimbo stood ankle-deep for a moment, looking out at midstream, hesitant.

  “Well,” Bright said, “are you going to swim or just wish you did?”

  “I’ll get my underwear wet,” he muttered, kicking at the water with a big toe. “It’s the only pair I’ve got with me.”

  “Then take ’em off,” she said.

  He turned, stared at her. She gave him a wave of her hand. “Good heavens, haven’t you ever been skinny-dipping before?”

  “No.”

  “Well, give it a try.” He shivered a bit, looked down at his underpants. She smiled. “Nothing’s going to bite you. I used to bring your mother and your uncle Fitz out here when they were little and let them swim bare-butt.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. Them and their dog.”

  “Dogs don’t swim bare-butt.”

  “Have you ever seen a dog in gilhoolies?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “I reckon not.” He cocked his head, still uncertain. “Are you going to take off your clothes?”

  “No. I’m too old to skinny-dip. Only old dogs and children get to skinny-dip. But don’t let that stop you.”

  He turned and looked out at the water. She could see him wrestling with himself, giving in finally. “Well, don’t look.” She turned her back to him, gazing off downriver where it made another wide bend and disappeared into the forest that grew close to its banks. She spied the heron perched on a low branch overhanging the water, looking back at her. She started to wave, then thought how silly that would be. A sixty-eight-year-old woman waving at a bird. Maybe when she was seventy. But not yet. She heard Jimbo behind her at the edge, then splashing out toward the middle. She turned back in time to see his scrawny bare bottom disappear as he reached midstream and settled into the water, making small waves with a sweep of his thin arms.

  “How is it?” she called.

  “It feels good. A little cool.” His eyes were wide, surprised at what he had done, still a bit uncertain that it was the right thing. But he stayed there, moved about in the water. It flowed gently here, just enough to caress the skin.

  “Don’t get out too far. I don’t want to have to fetch you.” She thought suddenly of Flavo Richardson’s grandson, the small brown lifeless body lifted from the dark water underneath the bridge. She felt a small rush of panic, started to call out to Jimbo again to be careful. But she thought better of it. Instead, she turned her back on Jimbo and walked out of the water and stood on the narrow sandbar. The river is not dangerous here. It is a good place.

  Bright smoothed out a place in the sand and sat, feeling the coolness beneath her slip, the warmth of the sun on the back of her head as it rose now well above the treetops, glinting off the ripples that Jimbo made in the water as he moved about, testing the bottom with his feet.

  She thought then of her father, and strangely enough she thought of his resting place. It came seldom to mind, and she rarely visited it. It was in the old part of the cemetery where there were trees, weathering gravestones among gnarled brown trunks, shaded by thick branches. The old families were there. In the newer sections, there were no trees and no true tombstones, only small granite markers set flush with the ground so that mowers could pass over them. Perpetual care. In the old part where Dorsey lay, “perpetual care” meant the families, several times a year with rakes and hoes, tending and honoring their dead. She went enough to keep it up, but it was here—in this still place by the river—that Dorsey Bascombe haunted. She had always been able to hear him in this place. But not this time.

  I’ve been waiting all night, Papa. Waiting for you to speak to me, to tell me what to do. All I heard was the night and echoes from your trombone. Is that what you do now? Sit around and trade music with God? Does his breathing really sound like a low E-flat? Is he tone-deaf? Does he, or you, care a whit about our miserable human fidgetings? Or do you both just say, “Work it out. We’ve got better things to do”?

  No, Dorsey Bascombe hadn’t spoken. So here she sat on the sandbar in her gilhoolies. Still waiting.

  “Ow!” Jimbo yelled from midstream.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I stubbed my toe.”

  “Is it bleeding?”

  He reached down to feel his foot, lost his balance, toppled and disappeared under the surface, came up spewing and grinning. “No, I don’t think it’s bleeding.”

  “Good. Nothing for the sharks to smell.”

  The water came halfway up his torso where he was now and he stood, splashing his hands back and forth, sending water volleys across the surface that sparkled in the new sun. “Aw, there ain’t no sharks in here.”

  “No,” she said, “I reckon there ain’t.”

  He shrugged, then arched forward into the water and disappeared again, leaving the surface roiled. He frolicked in and out as she watched, losing himself in play.

  She thought about Dorsey again, about the thing he had said so often in her youth. “Something will always come along.” And she had always believed it. It was a Bascombe credo. But later, when he was gone, she realized that he had not truly believed it himself, at least not there at the last. Dorsey had discovered that there might be a time when you stood with your back to the wall, the wolves snapping at your throat, waiting for something to come along, and nothing did. “Okay, God, DO IT!” you said, and got only silence in return—or, if God is a bit perverse, a faint snicker.

  Maybe that’s what Dorsey was trying to tell her now with his own silence. Sometimes, nothing comes along. Then you’re left with nothing but your own wits and ingenuity and stubbornness. So what do you do? Dorsey had had his own final answer. Dorsey Bascombe had simply gone away. Was it a cowardly thing to do? Or the most sensible under the circumstances? She didn’t know that, either. She didn’t judge. We all simply make choices. I know all about that.

  Then she thought suddenly of Fitzhugh. He had wanted to be cremated. The logical thing, he said. None of this business of filling you up wit
h embalming fluid and putting you on display with a boutonniere in your buttonhole for everybody to gawk over. Nothing there anymore, just a shell. Better to have just the memory. Fitzhugh prided himself on his logic. But when the time came … “Ah,” he must have thought, “another disappointment. But what could I expect? She never did a damn thing I wanted.”

  And perhaps that was the root and sum of what bothered her now and had for a good number of years. Disappointment, a long string of it going back as far as she could remember. People she loved, disappointing her. Elise and Dorsey, to begin with. And she in turn, disappointing others. Was it an inheritance, a family curse born of some unnatural orneriness of the Bascombes? The thing of it was, Bright had tried to stave off disappointment by accommodating, accepting half of this and half of that in order to make less than a whole but more than nothing at all. But accommodation, she was beginning to realize, was no substitute for having lived a life, dangers and all. She realized that by doing so, she might have done greater harm to those for whose very sake she accommodated. Fitz and Roseann, and now this slip of a boy who heard and felt the echoes of a past of which he hadn’t the foggiest notion.

  So now, at this very late time, a basic question: Was there such a thing as atonement? And should she attempt it? Or should she simply let sleeping old dogs lie?

  She sat pondering it all, the questions swirling in her brain, as Jimbo cavorted in the water, losing his self-consciousness. The shining water made his thin, pale body sleek. He thrashed about, battling some imaginary foe—a crocodile, perhaps. There was something about the sheer abandonment of it that struck a deep, resonant chord in Bright’s heart. Nothing of choices here. Simply play, in the way only a child can understand. A thin strand of naked boy in the current, as natural as God could make a thing. Too soon, it would end for him. It made her heart ache to see it.

  He stopped suddenly, stood panting in the water for a moment, catching his breath, then turned to her, squinted as if he had forgotten she was there, had forgotten that anything existed but himself and this small piece of the river-universe.

  He shook his head and diamonds sprayed from his hair. “I’m hungry.”

  She heard the car then. It had a familiar sound to it, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, as it lurched along the rutted narrow path from the road to the camp house, the sound of its engine echoing off the trees. Then she realized that it wasn’t a car at all, but a truck. Buster Putnam’s truck. It rumbled into the clearing and stopped. The engine died and she heard the door slam. “Bright!”

  “Back here,” she called.

  Buster eased his way down the sandy bank, planting his feet carefully so as not to lose his balance. He was wearing an old pair of ankle-high boots, the kind her father had referred to as brogans. Dorsey Bascombe wouldn’t be caught dead with a pair of brogans on. They weren’t a gentleman’s kind of boot. Buster was wearing the same brown pants and faded flannel shirt that had been his uniform all week. When he sat down next to her on the sand with a grunt, she expected to smell its rankness. Instead, it had a clean, fresh aroma. “You old dog, you’ve been washing those clothes,” she said.

  “Hmmmm,” he acknowledged.

  “Is it all an act, Buster?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I simply feel comfortable in these clothes, but I spent enough of my life in the dirt to loathe uncleanliness. At least, when I’m sober.”

  “And you’re sober this morning,” she said.

  “As the proverbial judge.” He waved to Jimbo out in the river. “Looks like an amphibious assault,” he called.

  “A what?”

  “Attacking by water. Who’s winning?”

  “Nobody,” Jimbo said solemnly. “I’m just playing.”

  “Ah,” Buster said with a nod. “Much better than attacking.”

  Jimbo answered by disappearing under the surface again, kicking up explosions of water with his feet.

  “I thought I might find you out here,” Buster said to Bright.

  “How did you know about this place?”

  “Oh,” he said, “everybody knows about your old camp house. After you went off to the Conservatory, kids used to come out here and neck. We all figured it was abandoned.”

  “It was, in a way.”

  Buster looked back over his shoulder at the house, just the roofline visible from here through the trees at the sandbar’s edge. “Looks in pretty good shape now.”

  “I had it fixed up when the children were small. We used to come out here a lot, spend the night, swim in the river.”

  “Like Jimbo.”

  “Yes, like Jimbo. I’d like to bring him out here a lot.”

  Jimbo called to them now from the river. “I’m ready to come out now.”

  “Well, come ahead, then,” Bright answered.

  “Turn your heads,” he said.

  Buster stifled a snort, and they turned their heads and looked off downriver. The heron was gone now from its perch above the sluggish water. Off fishing where there wasn’t so much commotion, no doubt. These clumsy, wingless creatures, invading its sanctuary, just at the best time of the day. A bother.

  Bright heard Jimbo splash toward them then, out of the water, the soft crunch of his bare feet across the sand. “You’ll find a towel in the bottom drawer of the dresser,” she said. “Check for spiders.” Then he was past them, climbing the bank, and they turned to see his backside disappear, and the white of the underpants he held in his hand.

  “There’s food in the front seat of the truck,” Buster called after him. “Some ham and biscuits. Help yourself.”

  “All right.”

  “He could be a fairly normal boy,” Buster said to Bright.

  “How would you know about boys, normal or otherwise?” Bright tossed back. “You never had any children.”

  “Oh, yes. I had thousands of them. All mine. A little bigger than Jimbo, but my kids, just the same.”

  Someday, she thought, she might ask Buster about all that, about being a Marine Corps general and about not becoming the commandant, the way people had expected. The thing in Korea. But she didn’t want to know about that right now. She didn’t want to know much about anybody else’s expectations or failures.

  “Have you been out here all night?” Buster asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Listening.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “Not what I had hoped.”

  “And what was that?” he asked.

  “Some answers.”

  “Ahhhh, yes. We do tend to go back to our old haunts in search of answers, don’t we.”

  She studied him for a moment. He looked very much in control of himself this morning, more so than she had seen in a good long while. More Marine-like, perhaps. “Is that why you’re bumping about in that ruin of a house?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’m just looking for a little peace and quiet. I’ve had all the answers I can say grace over.”

  “I thought I had,” she confessed. “But here I am at sixty-eight with all the answers turned upside down and becoming questions again.”

  Buster looked around at the river, the sandbar, up the slope at the tin roof of the camp house. “And nothing here.”

  “Not even so much as a ghost.” She smiled.

  “Then you might as well go back home,” Buster said. “At least there, you’ve got a house full of food. And I mean a house full.”

  “Why?”

  “Folks started toting it in late yesterday, when word got out you and Jimbo were missing.”

  “We’re not missing. And if we were, who in God’s name would eat it?”

  “That’s not the point, apparently. I guess I’ve been too long in the Marines. I forgot that when people don’t know what to do in an uncertain situation, they bring food. When Marines don’t know what to do, they start shooting. Come to think of it, food isn’t a bad alternative. Anyhow, Xuripha Deloach arrived with pot
ato salad about two o’clock. That was right after the Rescue Squad took Roseann to the hospital.”

  She stared at him, trying to find evidence in his face that it was some bit of foolishness. In truth, Buster had never been much for foolishness, at least not in their youth, when she had known him best. He was the small boy in overalls, standing just at the edge of the crowd, gravely earnest. And despite all his attempts to go to seed now, there was still an earnestness that he couldn’t quite escape. There was something rather appealing about it, in fact. A bit of the little boy remained, always would. At this age, you had shed all the baggage you were going to shed.

  “All right,” she said, “tell me what’s going on.”

  “The old Booker T. Washington High School burned down last night,” he said.

  “Yes, I know that. When we topped the River Bridge, I could see the flames. So I just turned around and came out here.”

  “Well, there’s a good-sized contingent of highway patrol in town right now. They’ve sealed off the Quarter. And there’s a good-sized search on for you and Jimbo between here and the state capital.”

  “Good Lord! Why on earth? There’s nothing wrong with us.”

  “A batty old woman and a kid and fifty thousand dollars in a beat-up piece of Plymouth?”

  “I beg your pardon …,” she started hotly.

  “Yes?” He looked amused. Had she made herself ridiculous? Of course she had.

  “Nothing. What’s this about Roseann?”

  “I believe they said she had an asthma attack. Got overexcited about something.” He raised his eyebrows at her. “Any idea what?”