by Ed Kurtz
Leon stepped over the threshold, past the sallow-faced man, and gently shut the door.
The hallway was dark, but a dim light emanated from the kitchen at the end. The air inside was musty and dank, rife with sweat and mold and sickly sweet food odors. Leon traversed the hall and entered the kitchen, which was only nominally more filthy than his own. A bowl of mushy brown beans sat on the wobbly kitchen table, surrounded by crusty dishes and empty bottles and cans. He pulled a dented metal folding chair out from beneath the table and sat down. The man still lingered in the darkness of the hall.
“Come in here,” Leon said to him.
The man obliged, shambling uncertainly into the kitchen.
“What’s your name?”
“Dane. Dane Honeycutt.”
“Dane. Okay, Dane. I want to talk with you, Dane, but my head’s killing me. You got any aspirin?”
“No,” Dane said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Damn,” Leon said. “That’s okay. God, my head hurts. But that’s okay.”
His head dropped low, his eyes narrowed. His skull felt like it was slowly filling up with fluid, and the fluid sloshed violently with every movement he made.
“I came to talk about the dog, Dane,” he said.
“The dog,” Dane repeated dumbly. “My Bess?”
“Yes, that’s right. Bess.”
“You took my Bess.”
“I did, yeah. Got her all fixed up at the vet, too. Wasn’t particularly cheap.”
“She was hurt.”
“She was beat to hell, Dane. You did that. You beat that dog and broke her foot.”
“Hammer,” Dane said.
Leon cocked his head to one side and pressed his eyebrows together. The fluid sloshed again, painfully.
“What’s that? What about a hammer?”
“The paw—I smashed it with a hammer. Hit her on the head with it, too. She’s a bad dog.”
Dane said this without inflection or emotion, his face droopy and sunken, a blank slate. His eyes were trained on Leon, but he did not appear to see him.
“No, Dane. She’s not a bad dog. But you are a bad man.”
“I—I am?”
“Yes. A very bad man.”
A flash of hot light exploded in Leon’s eyes. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut as he lurched forward. He heard a soft whimpering and realized that Dane was crying.
“I’m sorry,” he blubbered. “I’m so sorry.”
Leon steadied himself with his hands on his knees and concentrated on his breathing, measuring it out in slow, easy inhalations and exhalations. The pressure inside his head let off a bit, but the nausea deepened.
“I’m taking the dog back,” he rasped. “I’m taking her back and you’re not going to do anything about it.”
“I’m a bad man,” Dane sobbed. His shoulders shook and he wept like a child. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Did you hear me, Dane?”
“Yeah,” Dane squeaked.
“I’m taking Bess.”
“Okay,” Dane said. “All right.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing. I ain’t gonna do nothing.”
“That’s right.”
Dane snorted snot and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Leon rose from the chair, faltered, and grabbed the edge of the table for balance. He looked up at Dane, at his quivering lips and red, swollen eyes.
“Where is she? Where’s Bess?”
“She’s out back,” Dane said. “In the doghouse. I gave her a whupping. I guess she’s hiding.”
Leon’s eyes darkened under his gathering brow.
“You mean you beat her again?”
“Soon as I got home. Kicked her pretty bad with my boots on. I…I like to hurt things.”
“I think I can see that,” Leon said grimly.
“I do it all the time. Hurt animals. Get in fights. I…I think I maybe killed a guy one time. I don’t know why.”
“You’re just bad,” Leon proffered. “You’re no good at all.”
At that, Dane broke into heaving sobs. Leon straightened up and turned to find the backdoor. He had seen the backyard from the woods. All that was left now was getting the dog and heading back through the woods to the lake—a task that would be the easiest thing in the world were it not for the debilitating pain. He went to the door, stepping over the trash and refuse littering the floor, and unlocked the backdoor. Behind him, Dane let out a high-pitched, keening whine.
Leon opened the door and reveled in the rush of fresh air. Before he went out, he turned back to face Dane one last time.
“Do you remember where you dropped your gun, Dane?”
“Muh—my gun?”
“That little gun you had in your hand, when you answered the door. You dropped it in the grass.”
“Oh.”
“You should go get it.”
“Yeah,” Dane said. “I should go get it.”
Still crying, Dane pivoted and turned back into the dark hall.
“And Dane?” Leon called after him.
Dane stopped cold, freezing in mid-step.
“When you find it—the gun, I mean—don’t you think it’d be wise to put an end to all this?”
“An…end…”
“It’s just that you’re such an awful man…”
“I’m sorry…”
“I know you are.”
Dane sniveled and shook.
Leon sighed. “You know what to do.”
Dane disappeared into the shadows. Leon went out to the yard and shut the door. The security light blasted the immediate area upon sensing his movement, and Leon yelped. He covered his eyes with one hand and moaned. A few yards ahead of him, inside the doghouse, he could hear the rattling of a chain.
“It’s okay, Bess,” he said. “It’s all right now, girl.”
He pressed on across the yard and knelt down beside the doghouse. Bess was huddled up against the far back, trembling and wide eyed. Leon reached inside with his hand and held it there until Bess found the courage to sniff at it. She even gave his fingers a lick. From there he had little difficulty coaxing the dog out and unhooking the chain from her collar. And in the stark, revealing light of the yard, Leon could clearly see just how badly Dane Honeycutt had beaten Bess this time.
The gash on her snout was split open even wider than before, and it was bleeding. Her left eye was swollen shut. And judging by the way she loped and struggled, Leon felt relatively certain that she had at least one broken rib.
He stroked her head and Bess whined low.
“Shhh,” Leon said.
He squatted and wrapped his arms underneath her, and he heaved her up. She gave a sorrowful yelp as he squeezed her ribs too tightly.
“I’m sorry, Bess. This won’t take too long.”
Leon carried the battered animal and followed the fence until he came to the gate, which he kicked open. His head swam, but he kept on through the gate and into the wall of trees that stood between him and the lake.
He was barely two yards into the copse when he heard the shot. It snapped like a firecracker in the middle distance and echoed outward in a ripple of mimicking pops. Bess jerked at the sound.
“No, Bess, that’s a good noise,” he cooed to her as he tramped over dead leaves and dry branches. “That’s your freedom, girl.”
Bess nuzzled her bloody snout into Leon’s armpit.
8
Leon slept like a rock, due mostly to the oxycodone he’d taken immediately before going to bed. It was his father’s prescription, given to him for his chronic back pain, but the stipulation that he not touch alcohol while taking it meant Harold left it alone. He preferred staying drunk to treating the pain. He’d never even know it was gone.
The alarm sounded at 6:45, a grating, tinny screech that only gradually roused Leon from his opiate-induced slumber. He slapped the snooze button and restored silence before emitting a small groan and rolling over to face the wall.
He was strangely sore all over and hungover from the oxycodone, but his head felt considerably better. Now the pain was reduced to a dull ache. It was barely noticeable.
For the first time in about twenty-four hours, Leon found that he could think relatively clearly. Most of the previous day was a vague haze in his memory, a series of blurry images that made little sense. He was not at all sure what constituted actual experience and what were merely fragments from dreams. He lay with his eyes closed and allowed his brain to sort through the chaos until the alarm sounded again.
6:54.
He rolled back over and switched it off. On the threadbare throw rug in the center of the room, Bess glanced up at him with sad, rheumy eyes.
“Dane,” he whispered.
The fat man at the door. The rundown house in the woods.
The pistol.
Leon screwed up his face and stared at the dog. Just what the hell had happened last night? What went on between him and this Dane, and how did Bess end up back in his room?
He frowned and worked at piecing it together, but the chaos remained elusive. The blaring television set in the living room did not help, and Leon was puzzled when he turned to see that the bedroom door was standing open. Surely his father would not have let him sleep with the dog in the house and the door wide open. And what was he doing up at this hour watching teevee, anyway? Harold did not normally stagger out of bed until closer to ten.
Leon sat up and leaned back against the wall. A gaggle of women talked over one another on Harold’s television, arguing about the merits of some minor celebrity’s latest drug-fueled shenanigans. Their shrill voices buzzed in Leon’s ears.
“Dad?”
Bess grumbled as she shifted on the rug. Leon got up and shuffled out to the hall.
“Dad? You okay?”
Harold sat upright in his easy chair, his forearms parallel with the armrests and his wide, bleary eyes fixed firmly on the glowing screen. The women on the show waved their arms and shouted and giggled, seated in a semi-circle on a studio stage. Occasionally the camera would cut to some random member of the studio audience, all of them women, who would nod knowingly or hang their mouths open in disbelief. For his part, Harold simply watched. His face was drawn, his expression unknowable. Dark purple bags hung beneath his eyes.
Leon raised his brow and curled his upper lip. It looked to him as though his father had been up all night, staring at the idiot box. Perhaps even more troubling was the old man’s silence—it was completely out of character for him to keep quiet while opinionated women made their voices heard in his earshot. He should have been hurling misogynistic epithets at them by now, or at the very least groaning and sighing heavily and muttering crude comments under his breath. But he wasn’t. He only stared.
“Pop? You been up all night or something?”
“Hmn,” Harold said. He kept his eyes on the television. It cut to a commercial, something for a line of feminine hygiene products. Harold gazed at that, as well.
“Man,” Leon said, “there’s got to be something else on. This can’t be too entertaining for you.”
“Yeah,” Harold said softly.
“You want me to change it?”
Harold’s mouth twitched. He said, “Yeah.”
Leon crossed over to his father’s side table, found the remote, and clicked through the channels until he found a program about crop circles. The announcer gravely listed some of the most outlandish theories regarding their provenance, lowering his voice to a gravelly whisper when he came to aliens from outer space. Leon returned the clicker to the table and noticed the surprising dearth of empty beer cans there. There were only two dead soldiers to be counted, startlingly few considering how much Harold normally drank in a night. Having spent the entire night in his chair, Leon would have guessed his father drank himself into a stupor, but nobody passed out on just two beers. None of what he was observing added up.
And somehow he could not help but wonder if it had something to do with Dane Honeycutt.
“I’ve got to get ready for work, dad,” Leon said. He touched Harold on the shoulder. Harold did not acknowledge it. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I’m fine, son,” Harold said. “I’m fine.”
Leon patted his father’s shoulder and padded back down the hall to the bathroom for a shower. He did not believe for a minute that his father was fine, but he did not want to miss his bus, either. It was just going to have to wait.
* * *
On the no. 7 bus from the corner of Markham and Chavez cross-town to Lakefront Drive, Leon nodded in and out of half-sleep. And when he slept, shadowy recollections danced in his mind, flashes of strange encounters and some of the even stranger things Leon might have said. He remembered taking Bess back, and telling Honeycutt there was nothing he could do about it, though he was not quite sure how he got her home. He remembered taking the oxycodone—a stunning fifty milligram dose, he thought with some regret—and some terse, angry words from his father regarding the dog and Leon’s late night and the muddy, ragged state of his clothes. These choppy, muddled memories came in bits and pieces, interrupted occasionally by the jarring jostling of the bus. He was still a few miles east of Lakefront when, upon a few minutes of smooth riding, Leon’s watery mind hit upon the last thing he said to his father before going to bed.
Just be quiet and watch your teevee shows, dad.
Which was precisely what he did, all night long. The old man was in a daze, as though drugged—as Dane Honeycutt had been the night before. It was puzzling. Somewhere there lay a connection, something that tied the events together into a cohesive explanation, but Leon could not see it. He was too tired, too hung over from the opiates. And straining his sluggish brain too much was bound to bring the headache back. For now, Leon just let it go.
He got off the bus a block east of the Thompson & Associates building, per usual, and walked slowly to work. At the front doors he touched his security badge to the plate on the wall, which beeped and unlocked the doors with a harsh pop. Trey sat at the security desk in the lobby. He looked ridiculous hunched over the computer terminal, jamming his massive fingers against the keyboard keys. He greeted Leon with a toothy grin.
Leon thought, Fee Fi Fo Fum.
“Hey, buddy,” Trey said.
“Good morning,” Leon mumbled, not bothering to slow his gait. He just kept on toward the elevator.
“Rough night?” Trey called after him with a lusty chuckle.
Leon ignored him and boarded the elevator. He rode up to the third floor, disembarked, and wove his way through the cheerless, drab maze of cubicles until he reached his own. Right away he noticed the glowing red light on the phone’s display, signaling at least one voicemail. Figuring it was probably Cheryl, he left it alone for the time being. He booted up the computer and hung his jacket on the back of his chair.
The clock on the phone’s display read 8:03 am.
Leon let out a heavy sigh.
* * *
“And so Duke, he doesn’t get it, right? He runs off to Jennifer’s room with his, ha, with this deadpan look on his face, just a totally straight face, and he says to Jennifer, ‘What’s the big deal, it’s just a cat!’”
Leon knitted his brow and waited for Lisa to finish. From experience he judged her to be about halfway through the plot of whatever program she was explaining, some show he’d neither seen nor ever heard of. She never gave him any context to work with—he had no clue who Duke and Jennifer and Scooter McDavies were—but it was just as well. He could not have possibly cared less.
“So the next time you see Scooter, he’s back at the restaurant, he’s in the kitchen, right? So he’s, like, prepping the kitchen or whatever and all of a sudden you hear this mewing, like this cat that’s mewing, and—man, you should’ve seen his face!—he’s just like what the hell?”
Leon’s eyes shot over to the clock, a movement rapid enough to mark the time before quickly flipping them back over to Lisa. She’d been a
t it for nearly fifteen minutes now, and even if she was very nearly done there was no telling how many shows she was going to feel the need to recapitulate for him. There seemed to be an endless plethora of insipid programming geared toward people like her, and Leon assumed she spent the vast preponderance of her free time taking it all in—at least when she wasn’t bedding total strangers, if the office gossip was to be believed. Hour after hour of stale jokes and canned studio laughter. It was bewildering.
Perhaps the most vexing aspect of the whole thing was how attractive Lisa was. She was no supermodel, but practically everyone took notice of her, even other women. Petite but curvy, she had that girl-next-door brand of beauty that walked the fine line between above average prettiness and approachability. Sooner or later most of the men around the office, some of them already married, found themselves actively and aggressively flirting with her. But that was always before they realized how terribly annoying she tended to be. Lisa never seemed to date any one man for very long. Leon was by no means surprised by this.
As she reached the climax of her overlong summary—replete with grand pantomimes and overexaggerated, vaudevillian facial expressions—Leon caught sight of Ami peeking over the gray wall of her cubicle two rows over. Her head shook with quiet laughter at Leon’s unenviable predicament. Most of Lisa’s would-be victims around the office had long since developed the skill to politely brush her off before she got going, but not Leon. He always sat still and suffered the brunt of it. Ami made a gun with her thumb and index finger, pointed it directly at her temple and fired. Her tongue lolled out and she sank down behind the cubicle wall. Leon smiled and gave a little laugh.
“I know, right?” Lisa beamed. “It was a riot!”
“Yeah,” Leon lied. “That’s pretty good.”
“Well if you think that’s good, you should have seen last night’s episode of Frankie and Joe. Do you watch that one?”
“No…”
“Okay, so there’s these two Italian guys, Frankie and Joe, and they’re brothers, right?”
Leon’s smile melted instantly. Worse, he could feel a slight pressure building behind his forehead. The last of the opiate was working its way out of his system, and the headache was coming back, though Leon did not absolve Lisa’s obnoxious commentary from part of the blame. He was not altogether sure if he could take another twenty minutes of her.