Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  Thanks, but—

  As I esee em, Chihuahuas are estupid popeyed prisses, n you got too much class to be messin widdem.

  They’ve got their points.

  Yeah. On the ends of their ears. Mosquero laughed at his own joke, sclipping his scissors to punctuate it.

  Back out at the kennels, Conchos’s despisal of Dougan went unallayed. The dog chewed holes in his jockey shorts, shat in his Sunday oxfords, peed on the mahogany valet that Chalverus had given him as a wedding gift, and either strewed about the house or punctured irreparably every foil-wrapped condom in a box of three dozen that Dougan had bought at Best Buy Drugs. Conchos scrabbled at the bedroom door every time Dougan and Chalverus grew amorous. When they declined to admit him and made love to spite him, Conchos stood in the hall baying like a plangently deflating balloon. If they did admit him, Conchos straddled Dougan’s back and aimed penetrating nips at his nape and shoulder blades. This misbehavior had earned Conchos the sharpest scolding he’d ever got in Dougan’s hearing and a quick exile to the utility room.

  Couldn’t we jes kennel him when we git frisky? Dougan said.

  Why?

  I lose concentration.

  I don’t. Mmm. Mmm mmm mmm.

  S different for a man.

  Yeah? Howso?

  But Dougan could think of no explanation that did not imply that he might surrender total focus on her even in the throes of climactical passion. So Conchos remained indoors, if not in their bedroom, even when Cupid attacked.

  Outside the boudoir, Conchos played other games. He sat on the couch between Chalverus and Dougan. He guarded his daily allotment of N.R.G. Chunkletz—Chihuahua-sized pieces that the company had begun producing for smaller breeds—as if fearful that Dougan might hijack it and eat it himself. Conchos never carried any of his rubber squeak toys or his leash to Dougan, and on early-morning winter walks through the cacti he refused to take a dump until Dougan’s lips had visibly blued and his bladder had grown as taut as a volleyball. Often, once Dougan had unzipped and made steam, Conchos would give in and unload, eyeballing him from a crayfishing squat that only a smart aleck could have choreographed.

  Little dog, Dougan would say, you make me sad.

  But not sad enough to go back to the bottle. And, setting aside the hatred of one muleheaded Chihuahua, he viewed his new life with Chalverus as charmed.

  I have a new idea for our bidnus, Vernester.

  Yeah. Like what?

  Races.

  Whaddaya mean, races? Dougan stood baffled, transfixed by the applegreen fire in Chalverus’s eyes.

  Chihuahua races. Daily doubles. Trifectas. The whole ever-lovin pari-mutuel schmeer.

  Ha ha.

  S no joke, honey. It’s legal for greyhounds, idnit? Why not for my little Toltec babies?

  I don’t know why not, Dougan said.

  So they built it. Or, nigh on to singlehandedly, Dougan did, a track not much bigger around than the public swimming pool in Tucamcari, with two sets of seven-tiered bleachers on the eastern side so that paying spectators would not have to peer like nuclear-test observers into a blazing sun when the evening races started and the first nine to twelve Chihuahuas broke like windup toys from the miniature gates.

  From the beginning, business at Chihuahua Flats Raceland boomed, even if the dogs themselves failed in heat after heat to have a like impact on the sound barrier. Breeders from across the country fell upon Dougan and Chalverus’s little town to strut their dogs and place flashy wagers. By mid-April, sometimes as many as two hundred people occupied the stands; and on that redletter night in early May when the one-thousand-and-first Chihuahua hit the track for its maiden handicap, the raceland noted the event with a barrel drawing, a cowboy band from Portales, and a videocassette giveaway.

  Dougan announced. As the bell rang to start each heat, he intoned over the public-address system, “There … goes … Ricky!” and the mechanical rat that paced the Chihuahuas on a mobile pole lurched out to a herky-jerky lead, heading around the track via a concatenation of twitches and fits. Maybe a dozen times since the raceland’s opening, the lead Chihuahua had caught, or caught up to, Ricky, but owing to the rat’s size—it stood almost as high at the withers as the pursuing dogs, else even patrons with binoculars would have had a hard go seeing it—no dog had yet halted Ricky or dragged Ricky off its jerkily advancing lever. Dougan thought it unlikely that even a pack of Chihuahuas, cooperating as stranger dogs almost never did, could pull down Ricky and turn a decent money heat into a yelping group feed.

  Dougan enjoyed calling the races, updating the odds, and introducing such celebs as the owner of the biggest local car dealership, the latest homecoming queen, and the weatherman at the NBC affiliate in El Paso. But Conchos, the winner of four tiptop stakes races and a first or second runnerup in several others, liked Dougan no better. Floodlamps burned through half their nights, and Chalverus often seemed distracted by success, drunk on the picayune details of public relations, concessions stocking, and the twelve thousand applicable state and federal tax laws. Such crap made Dougan long for the desert serenity of Chihuahua Flats before the boom. Sometimes, then, he took a beer; sometimes, even, a hit of the hard stuff.

  Chalverus throve. An interviewer from a TV newsmagazine asked her questions against the backdrop of the sawdust track and its electronic toteboard, the hubbub of spectators, touts, bettors, and boozy hangers-on counterpointing the audio:

  What led you to open a Chihuahua track, Ms. Chalverus?

  The Chihuahuas. What else?

  Why not cocker spaniels or miniature poodles?

  I knew when my first hubby died thet whatever I did had to have a really cheerful grounding in my own selfhood. It also had to like start with the Chalverus sound. Thet was my first true ch-ch-ch-challenge.

  Challenge?

  To myself. To my womanly Chalverus spirit. At first, you see, I figgered chinchillas. A chinchilla ranch. For the furs n the cheap cheeky glamour.

  Okay. What killed that idea?

  Havin to kill the chinchillas. Also, you cain’t cuddle em. They have a odor n they bite. You have to kill em to git any use from em. The pelts don’t come off thout you brain the varmints then flat-out strip off their skins.

  So you turned to Chihuahuas?

  Didn’t want to cherry-pick. Or charm rattlesnakes. Or try out for cheerleader. N chow dogs’re too danged mean.

  Tell us, Ms. Chalverus, who’s your little friend?

  Oh. Him? Thisere’s Conchos. Say hello to all the folks, Conchos.

  Dougan, standing back, watched his wife take Conchos’s paw and wave it at the nation.

  Cute dog, said the interviewer.

  Thanks. My soul lives in this little dickens. Him n me’re jes like this. She crossed her fingers. So to speak.

  How does your new husband and business partner feel about the colossal upheaval in your lives, Ms. Chalverus?

  Dougan? Dougan honestly loves me. Whatsoever I love, even a persnickety n possessive little booger like Conchos, well, he tries hard to love, himself.

  So he’s happy with a thousand-and-one Chihuahuas aswarm in your backyard?

  Shore. Who wouldn’t be? We’re doin what we love n gittin royally flush in the doin.

  But Dougan wasn’t happy, and he didn’t love Chihuahua Flats Raceland, and Conchos’s spitefulness gnawed like a true rata (rat) at his bruised and tender alma (soul). This condition was so painful, and yet so inward, that it billyclubbed him when Chalverus, less than a week after her interview, received a medical diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer. Before he could chew up and swallow this news, she had to start a series of radiation and chemical treatments in Las Cruces. Her hair let go. Her skin turned sallow and squamous. Her eyes played daily host to floating graygreen clouds.

  By the end of summer, Chalverus was so sick that it hardly mattered, except to her, in which venue, public or private, she forsook the struggle and died. So Dougan brought her home. PR guys, gamblers, and uninformed Chihu
ahua breeders still stopped by occasionally, but all racing activity had long since ceased, and Dougan knew in his bones that Chalverus had contracted her terminal disease as an apology to him and a huge unrepayable gift. He said as much, in rougher words, as Chalverus lay abed amidst the air-conditioner drone and the brittle night hush of the desert.

  Nonsense, she said. Thet’s all pure nonsense.

  It ain’t, babe. It purely ain’t.

  Lissen, you. I had to’ve had this damn ol cancer before we even begun our raceland. Had to’ve. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be this far along to—

  She stopped, not for her benefit but his. They both knew dying was the missing fill-in-the-blank word, and even unspoken it dropped between them like a wall.

  You think I got sick apurpose?

  Dougan sat with his long hands holding the insides of his knees and his long eyes downcast in craven abashment. Even so, he managed a mortified nod.

  Sick apurpose? To give us cause to undo the nightly to-do round here? S thet what you think? Tell me.

  Yessum, I do.

  I got me a cancer to make you happy?

  Yessum. You’re like selfless thet way.

  Awright then. Let me ast you. You happy?

  Course not. How could I be? You think I’d trade off my precious wife dead jes for some lousy quiet?

  Chalverus rolled her face toward Dougan on her pillow and smiled. No, she said. I never thought thet off the top of my brain or deep down in its kinks, neither one. Which shorely orter tell you somepin, lover.

  Dougan began to cry. He kept looking down, though, and his tears plunked the backs of his dangling hands like beads of hot candlewax.

  On the bed beside Chalverus, Conchos fought to his feet, peeled back his whiskery lip, and growled at Dougan in pitiable quivering disdain. Chalverus took Conchos’s snout between her thumb and forefinger, tugged on his papier-mâché skull, and in spite of her weakness easily rolled him over.

  Hush thet disrespecful noise. You silly cur you.

  Dougan swept a forearm across his eyes and looked over at Chalverus with a question or maybe just a thanks.

  Take care of Conchos when I go, she said. Do what you want with them others, but save Conchos to home. Promise?

  Babe, you know me. You know me.

  Thet’s right. I do. I shorely do. N the Lord’ll repay.

  A week later, eased through at least a stint of her going by old Eddie Arnold songs and a morphine drip, Millie Chalverus forsook the struggle and died.

  Conchos, sitting on her sheeted midriff, lifted a long bittersweet howl.

  Dougan sold most of the Chihuahuas in the kennel’s runs and shut down its top two floors. He remained in Chihuahua Flats. He remained in his late wife’s house. He fed and watered Conchos, who went on eyeing him askance, hitching growly rides on his trouser cuffs, eating his socks, and awakening him from dreams of Chalverus with vampire nips at his earlobes, fingers, and groin. But Dougan forbore, in obedience to the deathbed charge, Take care of Conchos.

  One evening a month after the funeral, Chalverus appeared to Dougan in the kennel yard as he played hose water over the concrete in slate-thin tides. In haltertop, pedal pushers, and a wavery cape, she hovered three feet off the ground between a storage shed and the multilevel runs. Her image had so little substance, so little hue, that it looked to have faded from a hard medium like china onto a flimsy one like rice paper or old silk. It rippled as it hung, melting and remanifesting in the twilight like a Jornada del Muerto mirage.

  Dougan, she said. Dougan.

  This voice—no question that it was hers—sounded distant and tinny, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio. The voice startled him, though, even more than had the apparition. It startled him so much that he unwittingly put his thumb over the hose’s nozzle and sprayed the floating eidolon of his wife with a piercing burst. Chalverus billowed backward, dissolving on the fusillade, and then came together again, wavering, much dimmer than before.

  Babe, I’m sorry, he cried. Real real sorry.

  I cain’t stay, she said. I ain’t got the strenth. But I’m with you always anyways n won’t ever wholly depart.

  Like Jesus? he said.

  Lissen, honey, I love you. Even if, as thisere proclaimin shade, I’ve got to fade off to Lethe. So to speak.

  You only jes got here. You cain’t go.

  Don’t beg me, now. I’m leavin you with a comforter.

  It’s too danged hot for a comforter. Dougan flung the hose aside and trotted wet-faced toward the melting spectral figment that was, or had been, Millie Chalverus.

  Adios! she called in her fading cathedral-radio voice. To God, my darlin!

  When Dougan went inside that night, Conchos stood guarding the circular bed. The dog growled, feinting forward and back. Dougan opened the top drawer in his chest-of-drawers, found his gloves, pulled them on.

  Hush, you popeyed rat, he said. Then he picked Conchos up, carried him in outstretched hands to the bedroom door, set him down gently in the hall, and, ashamed for even considering such an act, slammed the door on him with a bang that shook windows and toppled bric-a-brac. He slept soundly, though, a dreamless slumber of scouring purity.

  In the morning, Conchos greeted Dougan with a wriggly butt, a toothy Chihuahua grin, and an ecstatic four-footed jig. When Dougan walked to the kitchen, Conchos followed at heel, yipping in excitement and homage rather than in provocation or spleen. Outdoors, Conchos took care of business in two minutes flat and returned to the utility room for breakfast. When Dougan poured N.R.G. Chunkletz into his bowl, Conchos licked Dougan’s hands; when Dougan pivoted to leave, Conchos reared up and begged for a noggin rub.

  What in heavenly rip’s got into you?

  Mmm, Conchos whined. Mmm mmm mmm.

  And Dougan knew. Chalverus had sent him a comforter. He let Conchos finish eating, then scooped him up, perched him in the crook of his arm, and took a reminiscent stroll through every room in the house and across every sandy stretch of his and Chalverus’s arid acreage, however Gila-monster-haunted or boobytrapped with cacti. As they went, Dougan murmured sweet nothings to the dog, and Conchos rode like a raj in a howdah, lordly as all get-out. From that day forward, in fact, Conchos went everywhere with Dougan.

  Even to the barbershop.

  Esorry bout your loss, Mosquero said, trimming Dougan’s hair as Conchos sat upright one swivel chair away.

  Thanks, Dougan said. But the dead can do things the livin cain’t.

  Mosquero had no reply to this epigram. He clipped and snipped. Eventually he said, I never esaw you as a Chihuahua esorta guy.

  You didn’t, huh?

  Course not. They’re aw like that one. Mosquero waved at Conchos with his comb. Ugly little rats. Deesgustin popeyed prisses. You musta had to take him to the vet or esomepin, eh?

  Mmm, said Dougan.

  That one he’s an especial laugh, eh? No more hair than a piglet. Legs like crippled finger bones. A face like one of them pickle-jar abortions. I mean, it’s—

  Dougan knocked Mosquero’s hand away and jumped from the chair. No more insults! he cried. Not another nasty word! Or I’ll danged shore deck yore ass!

  Easy, Mosquero said, conducting a calm-down symphony with his open hands.

  Easy? We’re sick of yore insults!

  I’m jess talkin, hombre. It’s jess my esame ol haircuttin esorta way of time passin.

  Well, don’t do it like thet no more!

  Okay. Okay. You got my esolemn word.

  Dougan and Mosquero held a long wary look. Conchos perched attentively in his swivel chair, a lopsided grin on his snout. Dougan sat again, and Mosquero resumed cutting his hair with a sharp sclip! of the scissors.

  A little later, taking care to say it behind Dougan’s bad ear, Mosquero whispered, But he’s estill ugly.

  With a Little Help from Her Friends

  TWO YEARS AGO, CARLOS KNEW, THE WOMAN’S LIPS had been sewn together by the rightist vigilantes who had overrun and occupied her
medical compound on the Pacific coast of the tiny Central American country of Guacamayo. The government had regarded her humanitarian efforts among the Indians as a subtle but insidious brand of Marxism. Therefore, while sewing her lips together, the agents of the Guacamayan status quo had declined to use antiseptics or anesthesia.

  Today, on the pine-shaded lawn of the Amnesty International Torture Victim Rehabilitation Center in Warm Springs, Georgia (one of seven such sanitariums worldwide), Eleanor Riggins-Galvez sat in her wheelchair fielding the video correspondent’s questions. Her voice was clear, but the aftermath of the vigilantes’ barbarism revealed itself in the persistent twitching of her mouth and the involuntary fluttering of one dry eyelid. Nevertheless, her red-rimmed eyes still held a disturbing sparkle.

  “They didn’t want me cheering up the other hostages with talk and songs,” she was saying. “That’s why they did it.”

  “You sang?” Carlos Villar asked, surprised by this revelation. “What songs did you sing?”

  “That’s enough questions about her ordeal,” said Dr. Karen Petitt, chief neurologist at the center. She was pushing the woman’s wheelchair down the walk, and she indicated her disapproval of the correspondent’s line of questioning by tilting its lightweight, blue-enamel frame away from Carlos.

  “Why did you tell him that?” the wheelchair’s passenger asked, glancing over her shoulder with one farcically screwed-up eye.

  “I think you know why,” the neurologist said.

  “To keep from reminding me of the horrors I’ve been through,” the torture victim said in a mocking singsong.

  “I suppose that’s an acceptable paraphrase of center policy.”

  “Karen, I’m reminded of those horrors every time I look into a mirror. Let Carlos put all the questions he wants.”

  “Do you want me to leave you alone with him?”

  The correspondent’s heart leapt. He worked for Video Verdadero, a satellite news service and broadcasting firm headquartered in Bogota, and it had taken him seven months to wangle this exclusive interview with La Gran Dama de Misericordia. He had succeeded, Carlos had no doubt, only because a maternal uncle living in Mexico City had funded so many of the señora’s quasi-saintly activities on the Guacamayan coast. By talking to him now, she was doing little more than acknowledging her debt to another man, and so far this afternoon she had told him nothing that had not come out already, shortly after the spectacular liberation of Casa Piadosa. If Dr. Petitt left, maybe she would open up.