Just Bill

by Barry Knister

  Dogs adjust, and so does Bill. But it’s not the same. Traces of the past remain. Left alone all day and sprawled on the kitchen floor, half conscious of dust motes floating in slatted bars of light, his inner clock still vaguely registers old routines. We should be walking now. Where’s the pool? The big ball the son throws in the net? Why isn’t the missus talking to me the way she does when the mister leaves to play golf? Where are the other dogs?

  Not as good, but a life. Food, some freedom. People two houses away own a dog he never sees. It barks when let out, a high yapping that stops each time a door slams. The mister next door looks over at him when he grills, but doesn’t talk. Once, the man’s boy, much like Ronald in size and movement, managed to work off the thing on the new mister’s gate. The mother saw him from her kitchen window. She slammed out her back door and ran to him, swept him up and ran back inside.

  “Good old dog,” the new mister says each time he comes back. “Still on the case? That’s good, that’s your detail.” Then he thumps Bill’s broad back, over and over saying “attaboy” like the first mister, but not scratching. Then he goes to the refrigerator and turns on the TV. No missus lives here. Once, one came in late with him. Bill had not been out since dinner. He had almost done the bad thing. He was put in the yard and left there. The hot July air was full of mosquitoes and mites, troubling him as he lay on the cement drive. In the morning, the one-time missus came out and talked to him. Then they were both gone. He’s never seen her again.

  LOTS OF PEOPLE come, each with a special aura, his or her own essence of the human. The landlady comes, to make sure her property isn’t being damaged by the tenant’s new dog. The mister’s father comes with his missus. They bring food and sit outside. They all talk the whole time, but not to him. He can’t know it, but this missing aspect of his new life haunts him. Alone all day, he sleeps most of the time. Awake, he wanders the small rooms looking for the first mister. Looks out windows for him. Listens for the big door going up, for the van or golf cart. He never knew what they were actually saying, but always knew when he was spoken to. And other times they spoke because of him. Times when he was just there, and, for whatever reason, his presence led them to speak.

  One night, the new mister uses the strong scent he wears when he stays out late. He thumps Bill. “Damn, you’re a good old dog, that’s a fact. You wish me luck, okay? This old boy’s way overdue to dip his wick, I can tell you—” He slams the door, and the truck noise slips away.

  The windows darken. The new mister keeps a light on in the kitchen. Otherwise, the house is dark. Bill roams. Looks out the front window. Bugs nick the screen, so many now that it’s almost August. Over the weeks he spent in the shelter, several storms battered the place. Lightning flashed down from the skylight. At first he peed and defecated, terrified. But with no bed to squeeze under, no mister, over time he grew indifferent to the pounding. Here, the storms happen daily. Sometimes thunder rumbles for hours but no rain falls. Just now, heat lightning cracks and hides itself. And again.

  Leaving the window, he wanders into the new mister’s bedroom and flops down. Straightening up earlier, clearing the floor of the week’s dirty underwear, Dewey believed these efforts would improve his chances of getting lucky. Bill puts his head down, ears working as thunder rolls and sinks. It has bludgeoned him too often to matter now. He dozes in flashes of heat lightning.

  Until the key in the lock.

  Up instantly, surprised and delighted he trots to the door leading to the patio. Still it goes on, the key in the lock. He waits. The sound keeps going. He barks. The clicking stops. He barks again, then it resumes, the agitated skirmishing of metal on metal—and now the door cracks. He has his nose there, knowing already this is not the new mister. He barks, his big voice filling the house—not angry, no watchdog, just barking. A hand tosses something through the crack. It lands behind him, but he keeps his nose in the crack. This time, something drops in front of him. Meat, strong-smelling. He snatches up the beef jerky and chews. Bill gulps the next strip, not chewing, looking for the next.

  This time it’s being held in the crack, not dropped. “Be nice, now…. No, dog, be nice—”

  Bill knows be nice. When that’s said, you have to calm down and step back, wait a second before the treat comes, or the ball is tossed. You have to behave. He backs away from the entry, whining. The strip falls in front of him, he eats. Another, a third. This different mister now steps in and closes the door. He drops another piece of jerky. “See that? All this shit about dogs—” He puts his gloved hand out. Bill noses it. The glove smells of jerky.

  “Show me. Go on—” He throws another strip of dry meat. When Bill has swallowed and looks up, the man says again, “Show me your house, big guy. Go on—”

  What does he want? He motions and repeats the sounds. Go somewhere? Into the house? The dog leads him out of the kitchen. “He won’t be back. I done the tootsie he’s with myself. She’s no Britney Spears, but she’s in the market. Her place is right around the corner from the bar.”

  DEWEY DOESN’T RETURN until the next morning. He comes in whistling, closes the door, then stops. “Aw, Bill, look what you done—”

  Still talking, he tears paper towels, gets down and begins wiping the floor. Bill watches. Too much time has passed for the dog to relate having peed to the mister’s scolding. That was after the man left. Just before, he opened the refrigerator and looked in. He found what was left of a key lime pie. Eating out of the pan at the sink, he looked at the dog, and again opened the refrigerator. “Ball Park hot dogs. You could do worse.” Throwing the package on the floor, he then carried things outside, coming back twice before he was gone.

  The new mister finishes with the towels and throws them in the basket. “But it’s not your fault. And let me tell you something, Bubba. It was worth a whole lot more grief than this.”

  But when he goes into the house, his voice rises and falls in anger. He goes all through, kicking furniture, throwing cushions. He throws the TV remote at Bill, then sits facing the empty stand. “Shit. Shit.”

  His friends come that afternoon. They drink beer and laugh about it. The new mister laughs, too, it’s what you do when this happens. “The sucker had some pie and gave Bill there a package of wieners. You can see how it was. Shit, he comes in, he gives Bill here his business card—” The friends are laughing “—‘Hey, how they hangin’,’ Bill says. ‘Whatcha need, some jewelry? Down the hall on the right. How about some high-end electronics? Not a problem, buddy. In the den on your left.”

  —You ran away, the shepherd says. —He hit you?

  —No.

  —Running is a mistake.

  —I didn’t run. He was gone all night. I peed. Just once.

  —They don’t bring you back for that.

  —He comes back. He wipes the floor. Everything is all right, then he’s yelling. Crazy. Someone came first and took things. A friend. I’m thinking it’s all right. He has treats, he gives me food.

  Bought originally to guard a furniture store, the shepherd doesn’t answer.

  RETURNED TO THE shelter, Bill resumes a life of sordid, empty days. Dogs come and go. Filling the hours, a welter of sensory overload gives way to boredom. Harsh Florida sun hangs all day in front of his crate; at night, shards of lightning stab down through the skylight. Being brought back and again confined, he has trouble eating. In four days, he loses two pounds.

  Then, on the fifth day he is let out in the morning with others, in the fenced yard. Hot and humid, the air is something to push through. By noon the sky has darkened, and by two the trees bordering the adjacent sheds rattle and sway. Dust whips through the yard. A plastic bucket flies against the stucco wall, then a lawn chair. One of the animal-shelter staff is now crossing from the sheds. Hunched and facing away, she is holding on to her broad Smokey-the-bear hat. As she nears the gate, her phone rings. She unclips it from her belt and starts talking, holding her hat, working to open the gate. The hat blows off. Still talking
she turns and starts chasing it, back toward the sheds. The hat whips and bounces.

  The gate bangs open.

  —Come on.

  The German shepherd is already outside. Skillfully mastering his injured leg, he starts loping away. It’s wrong, Bill thinks, watching. Running away is a bad thing you get scolded for, even hit on the nose with newspaper. He watches other dogs scuttle out, the woman still chasing her hat.

  Bill chooses and runs. He digs his hindquarters and races for the gate, banging a Weimaraner on the way—and then he’s out, racing to catch the shepherd. It’s easy to do, the shepherd hobbled. But he is now loping in a steady, altered three-legged canter, clear of purpose. Bill reaches him. The message from the Shepherd has to do with distance, the need to leave the shelter behind. In back he hears shouting, faint in the wind. Ahead, a fallen palm frond whisks across the road. In seconds they reach the highway. They run west, side by side on the shoulder.

  —Just run, the shepherd signals. —Don’t look back. Run.

  They do, together. He paces himself to match the slower dog. Everything now is wind. Everywhere leaves and torn seeds fly at them—they’re running directly into the first hours of a storm that has brewed for days in the Caribbean. Now rain falls in sheets. It doesn’t start small, there’s no light pattering first, no slow build. It’s thrown, pitched and dumped on all beneath. On the right the hot asphalt steams. Traffic barrels past, lashing the dogs with waves. Horns bray. Headlights and fog lamps seem to charge all at once through the curtain, whipping past.

  How far? A mile? All there is to know lives in his big legs and chest, energy and instinct. And the shepherd. Would Bill have run without him? Either way he has made another choice on another road, this one in Florida, in hurricane season, dodging a limb torn from a cabbage palm.

  And in the clatter and steam of it, the slashing spray of passing cars—something registers. I know this place. In his brain, narrow but deep in terms of sound and smell, he is certain. Ahead, lights are flashing. Some cars have pulled off the road. Nearing them, Bill leads the shepherd, picking up more clearly the scent and certainty that he is right.

  —This is good, he barks. —On the other side. I know what this is.

  No time or need to think. He cuts right and dashes over asphalt. This is where he lives, this is the mister and missus, the pool and rugs, the bed to be under at just such times. Tires skid, a horn blows. Still it blares. On the wide median he stops. The shepherd isn’t with him. Bill looks back. He whines and barks, a surprise even to those hard pressed to get where they need to be in such a storm. For a moment, distracted from worry about their cars and houses they point at him—and at the shepherd struck in crossing, now crowded against the median’s eastbound curb. Slowing, they inch along the right lane as others still race in the left, many talking on cell phones, telling one more detail from this squall-soaked day on Davis Boulevard, telling the person on the other end about some crazy big dog out on the median, barking his damn head off in all this weather.

  If this afternoon the mister—the real one—were traveling in one of the passing cars, deafened by drumming on roof and hood and, slowed by the storm so that he all at once saw what was there, on the median, it would break his heart. He would divine much of what led to the moment, not the details, but the fundamentals. He would stop in the road. With furious drivers honking and yelling inside their own stopped cars, he would get out in the storm and call his dog. The other animal he would know was lost, hit hard by someone barreling down the fast left lane. And if anyone with him objected, concerned about upholstery or clothes, if anyone voiced objection to stopping under such conditions, he would probably have told that person to shut up. Or, he would say nothing, doing what must be done, acting on an imperative made absolute by the knowledge that what he was witnessing began with himself.

  But he isn’t there. He’s playing golf on a public course outside Cadillac, Michigan.

  Bouncing over the gravel secondary road to the Vinyls’ lakefront place on this particular afternoon, a visitor is sure to know he has picked a perfect day to come. Unlike storm-tossed Naples, it’s warm and dry, the road a shady tunnel splashed with sun patches. Shifting with the breeze, the patches serve to animate the journey’s static mood of enclosure and peace.

  Pulling in and stopping outside the Vinyls’ shiny, corrugated pole barn (the landmark to look for from the road), the visitor walks along a cement path. Like the road, his passage here is canopied by maple and oak trees. He lets himself in at the gate (this and the fence added because of Bill), then walks to the back door of the big log house. The rarely used doorbell will sound tinny inside, like chimes in a church.

  But if the visitor knows better, he will instead follow the paver path to the right, bordered with impatiens. It ends at a broad bluestone patio laid before steps leading up to a screened porch. Both porch and patio run the length of the house. Down from this point, a grassy plain slopes for a hundred feet, ending at a narrow sand beach. The aluminum dock extends from this, and forty feet offshore floats a diving platform.

  Today, the visitor will find Vinyl’s wife knitting on the porch with Ruby and Ronald. This is after swims, and a trip to town, and puzzles on the floor after lunch. The missus hasn’t knitted for twenty years, but her grandchildren now attend what in an earlier time was called a progressive school. This one is politically correct, with a curriculum that makes much of Native Americans, the environment, and healthy food. It also does everything possible to insure the children’s studies are gender-neutral. That’s why Ruby and Ronald are both knitting.

  “You two are so quiet,” the missus says.

  “We’re concentrating.”

  “Look—” Ronald again holds up his work, wanting approval every five minutes. His creation, not yet defined, is being made of electric blue chenille yarn.

  “Beautiful. I’m very impressed.”

  He goes back to work. Over her own needles, the missus watches his sister. If not yet a skillful knitter, Ruby is very fast. She is making another scarf, this one a not very appealing brown. In the last ten days she has made scarves for her father and grandparents, another for her mother, and one for her best friend back home in Brooklyn Heights. Isn’t it time you made one for Jane? the missus asked on Sunday. I think that would be very nice. Ruby does what’s expected of her, so that’s what she has under way, a scarf for her stepmother. In her speed, the girl is dropping stitches, pulling her work apart and rushing on, driven it seems. For hours she keeps her long legs folded under her on the glider, getting up only when a foot falls asleep. Her eyes peer through the thick curtain of her hair. She frowns and purses her lips over the clicking needles.

  An outboard motor whirs louder on the lake. Recognizable by pitch and speed as belonging to a neighbor’s boat, the missus glances out at it, then back to her granddaughter. She thinks Ruby’s careless approach to the scarf might relate to her reading at school. She told them last night at dinner how her class of fourth graders has read both Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and simplified versions of the Homeric epics. She denounced Richard the Third (“He pays people to drown his own cousin in this barrel of wine. Then he kills his nephews”), sympathized with Romeo and Juliet (“really bad parents”), and judged Brutus to be a good but flawed man (“Ends don’t justify the means”).

  Then she described the insults to Achilles’ pride that explained his “wanting to be left alone.” She went into detail about Telemachus and his efforts to learn about his long-missing father, Odysseus. By then, everyone at the table had stopped eating. Her grandfather’s trapped look made his missus feel for him. He was having to stand proxy on this coded message for his absentee son.

  But Ruby had saved her greatest passion for Penelope. Over dessert, she went into careful detail about Odysseus’ wife, beset by suitors demanding she choose one of them. It was painful, all of them held hostage at the kitchen table like so many Penelopes, under the glare of the Tiffany-style lamp. Holding her new baby, Ru
by’s stepmother could hardly miss knowing who the besieged wife really was. Ruby heaped praise on the long-suffering Penelope, providing details not offered by Homer. “She’s in this big house,” Ruby said. “All she wants is her husband. Everything was going great before he left. Now all these bogus people are forcing her to choose. She promises she’ll do it right after she makes this sheet you put over dead people. A winding sheet. She’s making one for Odysseus’s father. The suitors can’t say anything against her. Making this sheet’s a custom. It’s her duty, but every night she pulls it apart. That way, she’ll never finish.” Coming out of her trance, Ruby had taken up her fork. “But they figure it out,” she said. “A maid tells one of the suitors.”

  A nice lake breeze now puffs the screen next to the missus. Yes, she thinks, knitting. Penelope gave Ruby her strategy. After the meal, brother and sister had gone down to skip stones off the dock. Still at the table, the new daughter-in-law smiled gamely. My pretty, gangly ten-year-old stepdaughter, she said. She’s a supporter of male patriarchy. Holding the baby, she continued eating her pie.

  A lawyer, the stepmother is taking a full year of maternity leave. That decision tipped the scales in her favor with the missus. So many now give birth, then six or eight weeks later hand over their new babies to caretakers, and go back to work. It’s a version of “having it all” she does not approve of. But her son’s second wife takes obvious pleasure in motherhood, and this has won over her mother-in-law. Holding the baby on her hip, she had used her napkin. Excellent pie, she said. It seems you have at least two Penelopes under your roof. What would be the equivalent of a golf widow in Ithaca? Sailing widow? Warrior widow? Ruby’s situation is worse. All the suitors want her to like them.