Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  Jack watched from the van window. The dogs were big, scruffy, burlaps brown dogs full of rural hatred for outsiders.

  I’m not getting out of this van, Jack thought.

  Hurley detox’s relocated patients were milling around in the weedy yard. Gates was just exiting the van, but ducked back inside. “Sheeeeeeyit. I knowed it,” Gates said, turning to look at Jack. “Dog bit to damn death! You call that curin alcoholism?”

  Jack didn’t. He couldn’t take his eyes off the approaching dogs. They were in a fever, a frenzy, of motion. There was something wrong with these dogs. The bigger, darker of the two kept twisting as it ran, was—yes—biting its own shoulder, yipping from self-induced pain. There was something very wrong with these dogs. They were wet, their fur matted. Their eyes were illuminated by angry red fires.

  Eunice was running, her pink robe flapping, an impossibly overweight butterfly, never to be airborne, her stubby arms stretched toward the heavens, her fingers wiggling as though seeking an angel’s protective grasp.

  The dogs saw her. She was irresistible; they turned and pursued her as she lurched and stumbled down the hill toward the pond. Her companions, with the exception of Kerry, clambered back into the van.

  “Cowards!” Kerry shouted. “You’ve got to help her!”

  Parks dragged Kerry back into the van and slammed the door. “We’ll go get help,” he said. “We will—”

  “It will be too late!” Kerry shouted.

  Eunice’s screams turned every head. The smaller dog had the hem of Eunice’s robe in its mouth. The woman was leaning away from the dog, yanking at the fabric of her robe with both hands. The bigger dog was circling, head low.

  Someone shouted from the tree line. A figure in a long, gray overcoat had come out of the trees and was now running up the hill, moving with long strides. His hat blew off to reveal shoulder-length gray hair, a gray mustache, the face of some Civil War general, crazy with years of deprivation and the denial of defeat.

  A shotgun was clutched in his right hand.

  He was shouting something, at first unintelligible, but then coming through the opened window with surrealistic clarity: “Dr. Bob! Bill! Stop!”

  Both dogs were shaking the robe now and Eunice, released from its pink confines, was running again.

  The dogs dropped the robe and pursued her.

  The man reached her before the dogs. He whirled in front of her and threw the shotgun to his shoulder. “Whoa!” he shouted.

  The smaller dog (small being a relative term; a big dog in almost any other company) leapt, sank its teeth into the man’s forearm. The man stumbled backwards and fell. The big dog had reached him now and lunged for his throat, its hindquarters trembling, its whole body jittering as though animated by convulsive electric currents.

  The shotgun roared and the man was instantly on his feet, standing over the broken corpse and swinging the shotgun in an arc, following the smaller fleeing dog. The man slowed, perhaps calculating the distance, perhaps hesitating. When the shotgun erupted, the dog yelped, tumbled, but raced on, howling, and made the safety of the trees and was gone.

  The man studied the trees for a few seconds before turning to regard the van with an expression of unblemished disgust. Then he turned and headed toward Eunice, who had fallen again and now lay on her stomach near the lake with her hands over her head, a posture more defeatist than defensive.

  They looked at each other, the van dwellers. Jack did not look in Kerry’s direction, for fear she would be looking back at him.

  “We need to process this in group,” Parks said, and Jack looked then, cheaply pleased to see Kerry’s disgusted glare leveled at the alcoholism counselor.

  “I say we process ourselves right back to Hurley while the processin’s good,” Gates said.

  Jack agreed but said nothing.

  “Bill Wilson was a good dog. Never killed no chickens, never got up on the furniture, never hurt a soul. There were some said, ‘You shouldn’t go naming a dog after the founder of AA. That’s sacrilegious.’ I always said, ‘This dog honors that name, makes it shine.’ He was loyal and he was good-hearted, and anyone who knew him will tell you the same.

  “Bill Wilson went crazy today, tormented by a curse, hexed, and the blame don’t lie with him. I know where the blame lies, and I’ll tend to that.

  Right now, I’m sending you off, old Bill. I’m wishing you a Heaven of fat rabbits and bitches always in heat. God love you.”

  He threw the milkbone into the hole. It made a dull, sad thunk on the top of the long cardboard box that had once held frozen poultry parts and now housed the mortal remains of a part ridgeback, part anyone’s guess dog.

  The man, whose name was Martin Pendleton, picked up the shovel and began heaving dirt back into the hole. He looked up, as though surprised to see the people gathered around him. He pushed the long gray hair from his forehead. “I won’t be needing any help here,” he said. “You can all go on down to the Residence. I expect you are hungry. Aaron here will see that you get something to eat. I’ll be along shortly.”

  As they walked down the road to the brown brick building, the air filled with swirling white flies, one of which stung Jack on the cheek and melted: Snow.

  “Damn snow,” Gates said, squinting up at the gray sky. “Damn fahm, damn old dogs, damn snow.”

  The cook, Aaron, apologized for dinner, which consisted of baloney sandwiches and applesauce. “I’m mortified,” he said. “You’ll think the worst, won’t you?This is grocery day, but I was unable to get into town, so...” He sighed, closed his eyes, and pressed his fingers to his temples. Aaron was a tall, thin man (his tallness exaggerated by a foot of bright red hair that rose toward the ceiling as though drawn by an electrical charge). He was wearing an orange silk shirt. His skin was pale, pinkish, and his lips, painted with glossy red lipstick, suggested a fresh wound.

  “You hate me, don’t you?” he said.

  No one responded; the question seemed rhetorical. Aaron glared at them, turned and stalked off.

  They were seated at long tables in a low-ceilinged room. It was already dark outside, and Jack could see fat snowflakes tumbling against the windowpanes.

  “He’ll get over it,” a woman sitting next to Jack said. She was a small Joyce Carol Oates sort of woman with a round face and short straight black hair. Large black-framed glasses magnified her eyes, creating a hopeful, inquisitive expression. “He’s always getting his feelings hurt, sulking, accusing the staff of eating his precious peach cobbler pie—as though he paid for it out of his own pocket.”

  Jack smiled wanly.

  “I’m Gretchen Payne,” she said. “I’m the secretary here. I guess you are wondering where the other residents are.”

  “Well...”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss it,” she said. “I’m just the secretary. I do my job, but I’m not supposed to have any opinions.”

  “Ah.”

  “What do you think of our little rehab?” She smiled, folded her hands and leaned forward. She nodded her head. “Well, it’s free. That’s what Martin—he’s the director here—says when anyone complains. He says, ‘You don’t like it, you can have a refund.’”

  “Those dogs—” Jack began.

  Martin Pendleton burst into the room, bringing the weather with him. The shotgun was slung over his back. He had reclaimed his hat. His shoulders and the brim of his hat were glazed with snow. Drops of melting snow gleamed from the thicket of his mustache. His eyes were black and angry under bramblelike eyebrows.

  Wesley Parks got out of his chair where he was sitting next to Kerry, and hurried toward New Way’s director.

  “Martin,” Parks said, “we’ve got to—”

  The big man nodded grimly, as though he knew the end of the sentence. He brushed past Wesley and walked to the far corner of the room where a white lectern emblazoned with the AA triangle-within-a-circle symbol stood in shadow. He enfolded the lectern in a massive bear hug, lifted it, and carried it
to the other side of the room near the door to the kitchen.

  He stood behind it, took off his hat, and blinked at his audience.

  He didn’t say anything for several minutes. In the silence, Jack found himself struck again by Martin Pendleton’s resemblance to a mad Confederate general (preparing to urge his troops into some final doomed offensive).

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Martin began, “I apologize for this inauspicious beginning.” He narrowed his eyes. “Where’s that fat woman ?”

  “Eunice is lying down in her room,” Kerry said.

  Martin nodded. “I’ll apologize personally to her later.” He looked around the room. He didn’t seem happy with what he saw.

  “You haven’t arrived in happy times,” he said. “If you thought you were bound for a picnic, you are gonna be disappointed. Old brother alcohol and his sister, demon drugs, are a match for all of us, and getting sober is a climb up a steep cliff in a thunderstorm. It ain’t never easy.” He paused, sighed. “Still, it is usually a sight easier than it is right now. Imagine if Bill Wilson, our founder, had been trying to start A A and someone was always dogging him, harrying him at every turn, pouring whiskey into his coffee when he wasn’t looking, filling meetings with dissension and rumor, flat-out lies like Dr. Bob is popping pills or Bill Wilson is screwing the new man’s wife while the poor son of a bitch is laid up in detox. Alcohol is hard enough to shake without people actively set on seeing that you fail.”

  He paused again, looked sharply around the room as though expecting dissent, some act of insurrection. Jack was beginning to have a bad feeling about this. He closed his eyes and saw Hinkle’s face, a rictus of terror as he wrestled with a malevolent toilet.

  “We had seven residents last week,” Martin Pendleton said. “They stole the van and headed off to California. Jake, my right-hand man here at New Way, he was their ringleader. He left a note saying stress had got to him, and he needed a break. His plan... you want to hear his plan for getting mellow?”

  No one said anything, which Martin took as a go-ahead. “He wrote it in his farewell note, said he’s gonna take the whole damned rehab to a Grateful Dead concert, gonna get mellow. The man’s so out of touch; he don’t even know Jerry’s dead. I don’t like to think how he’s gonna handle that.

  “I know what scared Jake and the others. That damn cult. We got a crazy, white-shirt-wearing cult here in town; they call themselves The Clear. They been hanging around AA meetings for two years or so now, but they weren’t much more than a nuisance at first. Now they are more aggressive.”

  The Clear. Jack felt his stomach twist.

  “We had an incident about six months ago,” Martin was saying. “A teenager, a girl named Molly Bluett, was trying to get her act together. Her father, Max Bluett, had been sober for fourteen years—owned Bluett Quick Stop Grocery—and he was seeing that she made an AA meeting a night. Getting sober doesn’t always work when the goad is a parent cracking the whip, but Molly was showing up, and we were glad to see her. She had a sunny disposition; she was a sweet thing.”

  Martin Pendleton’s eyes rolled up toward the ceiling, accessing some memory. He sighed.

  “My brother died drunk in a bar fight,” he said, his eyes shifting back to his audience, “and my parents burned up in bed, snuffed by cigarettes and alcohol. Alcohol tried to kill me too, but I got seventeen years free of it, and I won’t go back without a fight. It is a fight. Make no mistake.” He paused, collected himself. “So Molly Bluett ran off with The Clear; I imagine they promised her a lot of nonsense, and she was probably restless and bored crazy by the meetings where she was getting lectured by a lot of old men whose dicks hadn’t twitched since Nixon resigned. She ran off, and when she came back she was wild in ways that scared people, and her father sent her to me, but this isn’t a lock-up here, and she ran off again, and her father and some others went and fetched her—kidnapped her, I guess—from The Clear’s commune. Her father took her on home, and locked her in her room, thinking, I guess, that she was just being willful, and she hanged herself with an electrical cord.

  “Old Max Bluett started drinking again. One night, roaring drunk, he drove to the Late Niters AA Club and shot down two cult members who were standing in the parking lot handing out fliers. I was there that night. We all came running out of the meeting when we heard the shots, saw old Max reeling under the yellow lights, the hunting rifle hugged against his chest like a holy cross, saw those two dead kids, their white shirts black with blood, busted up. Abe Finners drove Max home, and I remember Annie Bascomb, sober twenty-eight years, shouting out that this was nobody’s business and that the rest of the world didn’t need to know about it. So everyone kept quiet, and those bodies just disappeared, and never a murmur on the news. A couple days later, Max used that rifle on himself. I expect he saw the truth: The blood of a couple of cult followers wasn’t gonna wash the pain out of his heart.”

  Martin was convinced that the cult was responsible for the strange behavior of his dogs. The dogs had disappeared for a day—and they weren’t dogs to miss a meal. A farmboy named Robbie Waller said he’d seen them getting into a black van. “A cult that will meddle with a man’s dogs will do anything!” Martin said. “The dogs came back, the very next day, shivering and strange. I knew something was wrong when Dr. Bob growled at me like he didn’t know me.”

  A pause. Then: “I’m hoping you folks didn’t come here for a rest cure. Because I’m gonna need the best each of you has to offer. You are in the front lines now. Yeah, Wesley?”

  Jack turned in his chair, saw Wesley Parks pushing his chair back, rising from the long table. “It sounds as though we have a situation here that can’t be addressed by a therapeutic community. If I’m hearing you correctly, murder has been done, condoned by an AA club—”

  “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say ‘condoned.’ No one’s happy—”

  “Still, the point is”—Wesley put a hand to his forehead—“we have criminal activity, a crisis situation. It’s out of the question to attempt any sort of therapy in these circumstances. I’m taking my clients back to Hurley tonight.”

  “Your clients are New Ways clients now, and they are going to an AA meeting. They aren’t running off at the first sign of trouble. That’s no way to get sober. If they want to learn how to stay sober, they will have to get in the habit of going to an AA meeting no matter what the circumstances of their lives.”

  “I cannot be a party to this,” Wesley said. He drew himself up, shoulders back. “I’m not staying.”

  “You sure ain’t taking the van you came in,” Martin said. “I’ll be needing that to take these folks to an AA meeting. They got a drinking problem, and it needs to be addressed. Way I understand it, you don’t have a drinking problem. You are more one of those authorities on the problem. While we are all floundering, bobbing up and down in a rough ocean, goddam drowning, you are off somewhere on a rock with a megaphone broadcasting all manner of help, explaining the backstroke and the dog paddle and I don’t know what all. Likely you know what you are talking about, but I’m losing interest, going down for the third time. There goes my life flashing in front of my eyes—a sorry-assed show—and I can’t make out a word you’re saying, and I could surely, surely use someone who fucking knew how to swim and who was fucking in the water!”

  Parks had turned and was walking toward the door.

  “Hey!” Martin shouted.

  Parks increased his pace.

  The shotgun blast shattered the plaque above the door frame, sent fragments spinning, tumbling across the linoleum in a Tinkertoy clatter.

  Parks stopped dead, his shoulders hiked up, his arms angled at the elbows like some still shot from a comic dance number.

  “We got a war on here, counselor!” Martin shouted. “I’ll drop you in your tracks, you try to desert.”

  It was a subdued crowd that filed out of the kitchen. Jack, eyes downcast, noted the truncated piece of inspiration (Old English lettering, blue on a white
background) that had come to rest against the door frame. GOD GRANT ME THE SER, it read.

  Snow came out of the black sky in a wild, dizzy rush. The snow seemed to sense that it was ahead of schedule, tried to fake it with enthusiasm, like an uninvited guest backslapping his way to the punch bowl.

  “You think they’ll hold a meeting? Won’t they close up?” A1 asked.

  The question was directed at Kerry, who was sitting next to A1 in the van. It was Ed Tilman who answered, however, leaning forward in his seat behind A1 and shouting into the teenager’s ear. “The meeting will be crowded,” he said. “I’ve made a study of the alcoholic personality. Your basic alcoholic is stubborn, contrary. You push, he pushes back. Snow falls, slicking up the roads. That’s Mother Nature saying, ‘Don’t be going outside.’ So your alcoholic says, ‘I’m on my way. You can’t stop me!’ That’s the way he’s made.”

  “I guess I’m not an alcoholic,” A1 said. “I think we should have stayed inside.”

  Just then, Martin Pendleton yanked the van’s steering wheel to the left, too quickly, and the van skidded, leaning sideways, and every one of its passengers (Ed, Al, Kerry, Jack, Gates, Wesley, and Eunice) made the same high-pitched sound (“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee”), demonstrating a solidarity of panic, and then the van smacked the curb, jumped forward, and slid through a red light.

  “You gonna get us killed!” Gates shouted. He had been curled in the fetal position on the backseat, but Martin Pendleton’s driving had knocked him from a sideways sulk to an upright rage. “We gonna be dead in a drift!”

  Pendleton ignored Gates, inured, Jack assumed, to the complaints of his charges.

  “All right,” Pendleton said as they pulled into the parking lot. “I want you to keep an eye on each other. Don’t anybody go wandering off alone.”

  The meeting was in a two-story red brick building on the corner diagonally across from the parking lot. It was an old building, with small, square windows through which unhappy souls could glare at an establishment across the street, a nightspot called Bob’s Beer Palace. Crossing the street, Jack could hear country music leaking from the bar, the unmistakable sad, besotted voice of George Jones. Jack felt a strong and sudden yearning to be inside Bob’s Beer Palace sitting at the bar, listening to old men and women stuck fast in the past, their voices filled with slowness and regret, the sadness of their stories dulled by the tarnish of endless telling. The sound of their voices would be punctuated by the occasional clink of glass against glass, the frothy hiss of liquid filling a chilled mug.