Just Bill

by Barry Knister

  She had left the table. Looking at her husband, the missus waited until the rocker started on the porch. The mister was sipping another rob roy with his pie. You’re having more of those lately, she told him. Am I? How many more? I’m not criticizing, she said. I just noticed. Do you have any suggestions? He shook his head. This is not good, Fred. Again he shook his head. That woman’s got everything except Ruby, he said finally. Ronald’s on board, not Ruby. Not because there’s anything wrong with her stepmom. It’s just not there yet. Maybe it won’t ever be. No stepmom would be acceptable to Ruby, the missus told him. She wants her dad’s undivided attention.

  Her husband had folded deeply suntanned forearms on the table. I don’t know, honey, he said. I can take them fishing, I can work another hundred jigsaw puzzles. I don’t have a thing to offer on this.

  The storm lasts all day and all night. By mid-morning, the last of it has come ashore, moved inland and blown itself out.

  A stunned quiet settles over Donegal Golf and Country Club. It blankets streets littered with palm fronds, the silence broken only by the gurgle of overburdened sewers. People cautiously part drapes and draw back vertical blinds. They see battered flowerbeds, wave-like patterns of mulch dislodged from landscaping, swimming pools overflowing their decks.

  By two o’clock, the off-again, on-again sound of chain saws is breaking the silence. Nail guns and hammers join in, popping and knocking as crews set about repairing the damage. It isn’t severe—nothing like Wilma the year before. The power never went out. But heavy palm fronds have dropped through quite a few pool cages. Roof tiles will need replacing on the clubhouse and golf-cart shed. Casual water will figure for days on all but five of the fairways, and a small assessment will be needed to replace surveillance cameras torn from posts.

  In fact, while glad nothing too serious has come of the storm, those with more serious damage regret that the highest recorded wind speed fell shy of tropical-storm status. Without that designation, no name was given, and a no-name storm means insurance policies will pay nothing.

  People come out to pick up and rake their yards. Skimming pools, they call to each other and trade stories. They laugh in an unspoken understanding that those who stay through the summer have something on owners who go north and are fooling around in dull places like Michigan and Illinois.

  BECAUSE OF SO much activity, no one passes along the brick path behind the Vinyls’ pool cage.

  The frame is intact. The overhead screen sags a bit from leaves and a dead mourning dove. The heavy stone and glass patio table, always left outside, trembles with water. The house itself has sustained no damage. Secure behind hurricane shutters, after eight weeks it is as close and lightless as a tomb.

  But even if someone were to pass the Vinyls’ place this afternoon, he might not see the dog there, under the table. And if in the days following someone happens to note a break in the screen door, that will be unremarkable, given the storm. Perhaps the passerby might make a mental note, but not feel a need to enter the cage and check on things.

  Stunned, the big dog stays where he is all morning. He is unconvinced it’s over.

  FROM THE FIRST certainty on the road that he knew where he was, Bill didn’t need to think. When the shepherd failed to respond or move in the gutter, horns honking, Bill spun away and bounded across Davis. Pounding up the entrance drive, then under the barrier gate (the guard long gone from his post), he sought shelter there. When lightning touched down on his right, he ran howling to the club’s restaurant entrance. It was where the mister had come for beer and talk, Bill waiting on the lawn outside. At some point the memory led to a sense of urgency about going to the house. The mister had left him and gone on alone, something had happened to him.

  Seeking shelter, the dog worked his way next to the ficus hedge that marked the outer perimeter of the property. No other protection would figure between this point and the street of houses. The ficus, too dense to push through, meant he must run exposed on his left. A lightning strike touched down ahead, visible on the course. Bill barked in fear, still running, raking the hedge. Then came the lightning’s mortar-shell explosion, thunder so big it shook the ground. The dog cowered against the hedge. Then continued. Twice, vehicle headlights raked past, first those of the greens keeper’s pickup, then a security SUV.

  In this way the dog reached the house. It was at the height of the storm when he shoved at the screen door in the old way. Lightning strikes were coming now almost continuously, neon veins out on the course followed by artillery rounds. He bumped through the door. At the place where the doorwall should be, standing on hind legs and taller than some men, he pawed the steel shutter. Metal slats thundered under his paws, the dog lost to fear, whimpering and confused. Confined to what he knew, Bill had found his home. That meant the mister was here, too. Inside, with the missus. If his dog beat long enough, kept barking and pawing, he would come. Small metal spurs on the shutter slats broke the soft skin between the pads of the dog’s paws. No matter. It would open, soon the mister would shove apart the glass and Bill would scuttle under the bed. The mister would not leave this time but stay there in the room telling him It’s all right, old sport, it’s all right, cool your jets—

  BUT HE DIDN’T come. Barking, crying after the fashion of big dogs in a state of fear—not a high sound but guttural, alarming—the animal at last squeezed his body flush with the house wall. The table offered some shelter, under the covered part of the lanai.

  But the storm. The eleventh fairway lay flat and vulnerable. Even those neighbors still in their houses, those who dared peek through their drapes would later insist that, name or no name, something big had gone on out there. It was weather so powerful, one said, it seemed to have a personality. An identity. And they would all insist that this presence had concentrated itself right outside, down on the eleventh fairway.

  THE SOUND OF repairs continues after dark. The dog stays huddled. Confused by the chain saws, he knows they are not part of the storm, but is still so frightened he waits for them to stop.

  They do, just before midnight. He stays where he is a while longer, then unfolds himself. Tentatively, he steps out from the wall, onto the deck. By this time, the overflowing swimming pool has returned to near-normal level. He hears a television. Reassured, he steps to the pool’s edge and drinks noisily. It tastes better than usual, the concentration of chemicals diluted by eight inches of rain. When done, he turns and looks again at the shuttered doorwall. Having eaten nothing all day, he whimpers, wanting in, wanting his bowls and the food the mister gives him, made with chicken broth. The idea makes him hungrier. He thinks to again paw the shutter, but moves instead to the screen door. He pushes. As with herding Ronald, when he understands it won’t open out, Bill shoves and claws the screen. The stuff gives, stretches. His untrimmed nails rake the nylon, the left paw shoving out as it did ten weeks ago. He pushes his head through, his big shoulders. Clear, the dog roams the familiar beds, beaten flat.

  But the weeks away have changed him. He is wary, cautious. Even in the dark, he stays near the house, out of sight. He has a fear of strangers, of those who drag you to trucks and cages, who catch you after being in the shelter yard and put you back inside. People who take you some strange place with a yard, throwing balls but then giving you up. In some true sense, experience has stolen Bill’s innocence.

  But he is starving. His big appetite and workhorse metabolism demand food. When all sounds of machinery and TV have stopped, he ventures farther afield, into other yards. He polices the perimeter of what had been his territory, sniffing, rooting. The nature of life in a tropical climate dictates that people take special care with garbage. Anything organic becomes a magnet for ants and vermin, so residents bag everything twice and keep their trash barrels inside the garage.

  He finds nothing. Most of the yards have been cleared, the street as well. Water still stands in pools on lawns. He returns to the mister’s cage and looks out. The sky has cleared. It isn’t hot, and the
moon now reveals the fairway. Monitoring the air for any scent of food, Bill smells life. It comes from the jungle rough opposite. Less pronounced because of the heavy rainfall, the smell of swamp contains as well that of chemicals. Low to the ground, he begins slowly working down the incline. When he reaches the course, the big dog lopes over the fairway, smelling something animal. It’s there to him, not in doubt, and now come other smells. His big paws sink in swales formed overnight in the sod. The sound he makes is that of a horse cantering in beach surf.

  When he comes to the point Ronald had reached before being stopped, the dog slows. He walks now, nearing the bone-white trunks of melaleuca trees. If he doesn’t remember Hotspur telling him in Dog about Randy the golden retriever, and alligators, he remembers something. A caution. Some admonition weeks before led him to tear through screening and herd a child as he had seen the border collie do with golfers.

  So, although starving, he hesitates before entering the undergrowth. It’s mostly saw palmetto, very dense. He gives all his famished self to receiving what the senses of smell and sound bring to him. Something dead. Chemicals. The discreet point sound of single water drops falling into standing pools. Cabbage palms, a few live oaks that have seeded themselves. Bamboo, toads, a type of snail that doesn’t crack even when clamped in a big dog’s jaw. His new fear of humans gives way to necessity. He prowls outside the wall of undergrowth, and finds a way in. He begins searching.

  If Bill actually remembered talk of alligators, of game wardens bringing poles fitted with loops like those used on Rottweilers, it might be better for him. He might then overcome his present fear of men and go looking for one—a security guard, a service worker on night duty buffing floors, or changing high hat lights in the clubhouse, jobs best done when people are asleep.

  Not better because a large gator is there, hungry itself and motionless, waiting to break legs with its tail, then drag its prey under water. In fact, Emma’s version—her mistress’s—that Randy lost his leg to a lawn mower is closer to the truth. Not a mower but a hedge trimmer had accidentally severed the golden’s leg—not here, but on the opposite side of the undeveloped property. Calling out in the most awful of dog cries, those reserved for mortal wounds, Randy had made it through the rough, to be found on the eleventh by a passing foursome playing their round before lunch.

  But it might have been better, because Bill would not then find the drowned king snake. Kings are big, and he tears and shakes it, holding it down with his paws, pulling. Need gives him strength and he works at it, a task uncommon for a dog accustomed to bowls and Science Diet. But instinct and hunger keep him going, grinding bones, devouring inner organs, even the half-digested litter of baby mice in the snake’s stomach. It’s not good, not right, but food.

  When he can eat no more, the dog finds his way back to the break in the dense saw palmetto. He emerges before the plain of grass glistening with moonlight. Driven into hiding by the storm, insects are now reclaiming the night. They fill the heavy air with sound. Following his own prints, he re-crosses the fairway, then trots up the incline. The dog does not look elsewhere, or again prowl the outer edges of his territory. He goes back and opens the door in the old way, pushing on the frame. That it still works as before—nose first, then the pneumatic door sliding along his flank—fits with the dog’s wish to recover his life, the right master, days as they should be.

  Reflexes slowed, he yelps at the pinch on his tail. Bill draws the rest of him inside. Still, even the pinched tail adds to Bill’s confidence. He walks back to the place under the table. Settling flat against the wall, he faces out.

  Five minutes? Ten? At last he settles his muzzle between paws smelling of snake. No longer starving, Bill remains alert. His sense of return, of having recovered the place where he belongs is real enough. Insects throb in the darkness. The enclosure and four heavy ceramic planters left out, his territory and the world beyond the cage all register. But they cannot displace the jangled mix of memories since Vinyl. This is where he should be. Where, then, is the mister and missus? They go places sometimes, leaving him alone—”Hold down the fort, Bill”—but always he is left inside the quiet house with its cool tile floors. Never like this. And he is fed first. After, he watches at the front window for the silver van. It comes back. Always.

  The Donegal golf course remains closed for a week. It hardly matters to most residents. The return of sultry heat and humidity make play impossible, at least for the most senior members. Outsiders who come to play at cheap summer rates are turned away. Until they dry out, there is no point in damaging the course’s tees and greens.

  The residents stay indoors for several days. They don’t think about it, but the storm has shaken them. They half believe it might come back. No one takes a nightly constitution along the back path. They walk their dogs to the nearest corner and back, trowel and plastic baggy in hand. Or, they let them out to take care of business. Although forbidden by club rules, this latter approach has been adopted by Luger’s mister. And Chiffon’s mistress never risks her stylist’s handiwork by going anywhere in such humid weather. The two dogs meet behind Trust Fund’s house, sniff, and mark. As the bichon squats, fucia head ribbon quivering, the schnauzer lifts his leg with assertive gusto. Were she there, Madame might call out “Sieg heil!”

  Now they stand in back of Glenda Gilmore’s cage. Music is playing. The dark lanai dances in an eery, blue haze rising from the pool’s subsurface lights. Floating on an air mattress, Glenda is humming to the recording.

  —No one is outside in this heat, Luger says in clipped Dog. —People stay inside the house.

  —She must like it, Chiffon says. —She floats on something. Drinking something.

  —She sings, Luger says. —What is this singing? It hurts dogs’ ears.

  —She likes it. She cries. She floats. It makes me sad. I cried, too. She saw me and said hello, Chiffon. Then she sang. I heard her say Hotsie.

  They watch a while longer. What they heard earlier was Glenda performing karaoke for an audience of one. But she is no longer actually singing. She’s just floating, humming as she listens to Nat King Cole, drinking vodka and tonics until she can face food. She’s not through mourning, but the collie’s death shifted the process to a new phase. Now, Glenda swims, does yoga. She exercises with dumbbells until she can’t raise the weights. She has come to believe physical exhaustion will eventually drain and squeeze away the blues. But these exertions are also a form of self-punishment. The dog’s death has come to represent a betrayal of trust, a product of neglect that somehow confirms the bad opinion of her held by so many at Donegal. She married Cliff Gilmore for his vitality, not his money. All right, for his money, too, but that was a bonus. And because he made her laugh. After the dog’s death, nothing seems to matter.

  —Nobody does this, Luger says. Maybe she’s dead.

  —She moves. See?

  —She should do something. I don’t like it. Why float like that? My mister plays, reads. He watches. Uses the computer thing. I have to bark to be fed.

  —A man comes to the house—Just then, a high note being held by Nat Cole makes Chiffon’s ears move. She waits. —He helps my missus do things. He says something over and over, she touches her feet. When he doesn’t come, she touches her feet watching him on the TV.

  Luger shakes his head free of noseeums. In August, they are very thick. —Live and work, he says. —Then die. She should be doing.

  Both of them now hear the sound of a dog being sick. Glenda doesn’t hear it, still floating. The sound comes again. Together, the two turn away and trot along the brick path. Again the noise comes. They pass three empty houses, the patio tables draped in tarps. Overhead, screens sag with leaves no one is home to blow off. Reaching the Vinyl house, they see nothing, but hear it again. Chiffon follows Luger along the cage.

  —Bill, he barks, smelling the scent. —Bill! Silence. The schnauzer reaches the door and sticks his head through the rent in the screen. Knowing who it has to be but also s
melling sickness, he steps in gingerly. Chiffon is afraid and whimpers. —Bill?

  At first, the dog can’t get up. Three of the four days spent here have been followed by nightly trips to the jungle rough. He has eaten more snake, found a dead bird. But the rough’s acreage, abandoned as unprofitable by the developer, has since become a refuse dump for work crews tending the course. It’s less trouble to empty the last dregs of mulch here, the rotten railroad ties used to shore up cart paths, dead plants, fertilizers. Pesticides. The latter, a mix of Round Up and Preen used to kill weeds growing in flower beds and paver joints, has leached into the rough’s swampy water. Even the storm’s eight-inch rainfall didn’t break down its chemical strength. Pounding the steel shutter the first night, the dog cut his paws. The cuts were made worse by tearing through the screen door. Through the cuts, the pesticides have entered his system.

  He struggles up to greet the schnauzer. He makes no move to nose or greet the other dog, docile and shaky as Luger meets the demands of nature. —What’s wrong with you? You smell wrong.

  —I don’t know.

  —Why are you shaking?

  He sees the bichon outside, but has no strength. It tires him to stand.

  —Many things happened, Luger says. —Emma left. They took her missus somewhere. Emma went with the ones who visit.

  —They came with a truck, Chiffon calls. —My mistress was walking me. They carried what you sit on.

  —Furniture, Luger tells her, not turning. —Did you run away?

  —Yes. The shaking makes Bill feel unstable. Slowly he refolds himself on the deck. He is panting, not from heat, from poison. —I ran, he says.