Seeing Red, page 27
And when Suzanne's tumors were a bad memory, a plague of superstitions followed. For several months she was convinced that I considered her leprous, sexually unclean. From her late mother she had assimilated the irrational fear that once doctors slice into your body with a scalpel, it's matter of borrowed time before the Big D comes pounding at the drawbridge.
The whole topic was a tightly twined nest of vipers neither of us cared to trespass upon anymore. God, how she could bounce back.
Passion cranked up its heat, and she shimmied around so we were face-to-face. The way we fit together in embrace was comfortingly safe. Her hand filled and fondled, and I got a loving squeeze below. "This gets enough of a workout," she slyly opined. Then she patted my waistline. "But we need to exert this. When we get the dog, you can go out running with it, like me."
It was depressingly true. Bucking a desk chair had caused a thickening I did not appreciate. "Too much competition," I muttered. I was afraid to challenge the ulcerations eating my stomach wall too soon. She was in much better physical shape than me. Those excuses served, for now. Her legs were short, well-proportioned, and athletic. Her calves were solid and sleek. Another turn-on.
"Mmiii." Her hands slid up, around, and all over. "Iii that case, come back to bed. I've got a new taste sensation I know you're just dying to try."
The following morning, I met the huge bald man.
He was wearing a circus-tent-sized denim coverall, gumsoled work boots, and an old cotton shirt, blazing white and yellowed at the armpits. He was busily rummaging in Dunwoody's mailbox.
I played it straight, clearing my throat too loudly and standing by.
He started, looking up and yanking his hand out of the box. His head narrowed at the hat-brim line and bulged up and out in the back, as though his skull had been bound in infancy, ritually deformed. His tiny black eyes settled on me and a wide grin split his face. Too wide.
,"G'morn' he said with a voice like a foghorn. My skin contracted. I got the feeling he was sniffing me from afar. His lips continued meaningless movements while he stared.
"Orinly!"
Creighton Dunwoody was hustling down the path from his house. The hillside was steep enough to put his cellar floor above the level of our roof. He wore an undershirt and had a towel draped around his neck; he had obviously interrupted his morning shave to come out and yell. Drooping suspenders danced around his legs as he mountaineered down the path.
Ormly cringed at the sound of his name, but did not move. Birds twittered away the morning, and he grinned hugely at their music.
For one frozen moment we faced off, a triangle with Ormly at the mailboxes. I thought of the three-way showdown at the climax of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Dunwoody stopped to scope us out, made his decision with a grunt, and resumed his brisk oldster's stride toward me. He realized the burden of explanation was his, and he motioned me to approach the mailboxes. His mouth was a tight moue of anger or embarrassment. Maybe disgust. But he bulled it through.
"Mister Taske. This here's Ormly. My boy." He nodded from him to me and back again. "Ormly. Mister Taske is from the city. You should shake his hand."
Dunwoody's presence did not make it any easier to move into Ormly's range. Without the workboots he would still be a foot taller than I was. I watched as his brain obediently motivated his hand toward me. It was like burying my own hand in a catcher's mitt. He was still grinning.
The social amenities executed, Dunwoody said, "You get on back up the house now. Mail ain't till later."
Ormly minded. I've seen more raw intelligence in the eyes of goldfish. As he clumped home, I saw a puckered fist of scar tissue nested behind his left ear. It was a baseball-sized hemisphere, deeply fissured and bone white. A big bite of brains was missing there. Maybe his pituitary gland had been damaged as part of the deal.
Dunwoody batted shut the lid to his mailbox; it made a hollow chunk sound. "S'okay' he said. "Ormly's not right in the head."
I was suddenly embarrased for the older man.
"Sometimes he gets out. He's peaceful, though. He has peace. Ain't nothing to be afraid of:"
I took a chance and mentioned what I'd seen last night. His eyes darted up to lock onto mine for the first time.
"And what were you doin' up that time of night anyhow, Mister Taske?" That almost colonial mistrust of newcomers was back.
"I woke up. Thought I heard something crashing around in the woods." The lie slipped smoothly out. So far, I'd aimed more lies at Dunwoody than truth. It was stupid for me to stand there in my C&R three-piece, calthide attaché case in hand, judging his standards of honesty.
This ain't the city. Animals come down from the hills to forage. Make sure your garbage can lids are locked down or you'll have a mess to clean up."
I caught a comic picture of opening the kitchen door late at night and saying howdy-do to a grizzly bear. Not funny. Nearly forty yards up the bill, I watched Ormly duck the front door lintel and vanish inside. Dunwoody's house cried out for new paint. It was as decrepit as his mailbox.
Dunwoody marked my expression. "Ormly's all I got left. My little girl, Sarah, died a long time ago. The crib death. Primmy—that's my wife; her name was Primrose—is dead, too. She just didn't take to these parts .....His voice trailed off.
I felt like the shallow, yuppie city slicker I was. I wanted to say something healing, something that would diminish the gap between me and this old rustic. He was tough as a scrub bristle. His T-shirt was frayed but clean. There was shaving lather drying on his face, and he had lost a wife, a daughter, and from what I'd seen, ninety percent of a son. I wanted to say something. But then I saw his bare arms, and the blood drained from my face in a flood.
He didn't notice, or didn't care.
I checked my watch in an artificial, diversionary move Dunwoody saw right through. It was it Cartier tank watch. I felt myself sinking deeper.
"Mind if! ask you a question?"
"Uh—no." I shot my cuff to hide the watch, which had turned ostentatious and loud.
"Why do you folks want to live here?" There it was: bald hostility, countrified, but still as potent as snake venom. I tried to puzzle out some politic response to this when he continued. "I mean, why live here when it makes you so late for everything?" His eyes went to my shirtsleeve, which concealed my overpriced watch.
He shrugged and turned toward his house with no leavetakings, as before. All I could register in my brain were his arms. From the wrists to where they met his undershirt, Dunwoody's arms were seeded with more tiny puncture marks than you would have found on two hundred junkies up in the Mission district. Thousands and thousands of scarred holes.
My trusty BMW waited, a sanctuary until the scent of leather upholstery brought on new heartstabs of class guilt. It was simple to insulate oneself with the trappings of upward mobility, with things. My grand exit was marred by sloppy shifting. The closer I drew to the city the better I felt, and my deathgrip on the wheel's racing sleeve gradually relaxed.
Maybe our other neighbors would make themselves apparent in time. Oh bliss oh joy.
Brix became the dog's name by consensus. I stayed as far away from that decision as politely possible. Dad the diplomat.
Jilly had thrilled to its reddish-brown coat, which put her in mind of "bricks," you see. Suzanne went at tedious length about how Alsatians reacted best to monosyllabic names containing a lot of hard consonants. In a word, that was Brix—and he was already huge enough for Jilly to ride bareback. He could gallop rings around Suzanne while she jogged. He never got winded or tired. He looked great next to the fireplace. A Christmas card snapshot of our idyllic family unit would have made you barf from the cuteness: shapely, amber-haired Morn; angelic blond Jillian Heather; Brix the Faithful Canine ... and sourpuss Dad with his corporate, razor cut and incipient ulcers. We were totally nuclear.
I didn't bother with Dunwoody or Ormly again until the night Brix got killed.
It was predestined that the dog's sleeping mat would go at the foot of Jilly's hide-a-bed. While Suzanne and I struggled patiently to indoctrinate the animal to his new name and surroundings, he'd snap to and seek July the instant she called him, They were inseparable, and that was fine. The dog got a piece of Jilly's life; Suzanne and I were fair-traded a small chunk of the personal time we'd sacrificed in order to he called Mommy and Daddy. This payoff would accrue interest, year by year, until the day our daughter walked out the door to play grownup for the rest of her life. It was a bittersweet revelation: starting right now, more and more of her would be lost to us. On the other hand, the way she flung her arms around Brix's ruff and hugged him tight made me want to cry, too.
Since we'd assumed residence in Point Pitt, our lives really had begun to arrange more agreeably. Our city tensions bled off. We were settling, healing. Sometimes I must he forced to drink the water I lead myself to.
Brix quickly cultivated one peculiar regimen. At Jilly's bedtime he'd plunk his muzzle down on the mat and play prone sentry until her breathing became deep and metered. Then he'd lope quietly out to hang with the other humans. When our lights went down, he'd pull an about-face and trot back to his post in Jilly's room. Once or twice I heard him pacing out the size of the house in the middle of the night, and when the forest made its grizzly-bear commotions, Brix would return one or two barks of warning. He never did this while in Jilly's room, which was considerate of him. Barks sufficed. In his canine way, he kept hack the dangers of the night.
So when he went thundering down the stairs barking loudly enough to buzzthe woodwork, I woke up knowing something was not normal. Suzanne moaned and rolled over, sinking her face into the pillows. I extricated myself from the sleepy grasp of her free arm in order to punch in as Daddy the night watchman. The digital clock merrily announced 3:44 A.M. And counting.
Point Pitt was not a place where residents bolted their doors at night, although that was one habit I was in no danger of losing, ever. Because the worst of summer still lingered, we had taken to leaving a few windows open. It wasn't completely foolish to assume some thief might be cruising for a likely smash-and-grab spot. By the time the sheriffs (the district's only real law enforcement) could be summoned, even an inept burglar would have ample time to rip off all the goodies in the house and come back for seconds. While this sort of social shortcoming was traditionally reserved for the big bad city, there was no telling who might start a trend, or when.
Besides, if there were no bad guys, I might be treated to the surreal sight of a live bear consuming my rubbish.
Downstairs a window noisily ceased existence. Breaking glass is one of the ugliest sounds there is. I picked up speed highballing down the stairs.
I thought of the claw hammer Suzanne had been using while hanging plants in her little conservatory and hung the corner wildly, skidding to a stop and embedding a flat wedge of glass into the ball of my right foot. I howled, keeled over, and obliterated a dieffenbachia mounted in a wire tripod. The entire middle section of leaded-glass panes was blown out into the night. Pots swung crookedly in their macrame slings where Brix had leapt through.
Somewhere in the backyard he was having it rabidly out with the interloper, scrabbling and snapping.
Grimacing, I stumped into the kitchen and hit the backyard light switches. Nothing. The floodlamps were still lined up on the counter in their store cartons, with a Post-It note stuck to the center one, reminding me of another undone chore. Outside the fight churned and boiled and I couldn't see a damned thing.
My next thought was of the shotgun. I limped back to the stairs, leaving single footprints in blood on the hardwood floor. Brix had stopped barking.
"Carl?"
"I'm okay," I called toward the landing. To my left was the shattered conservatory window, and the toothless black gullet of the night beyond it. "Brix! Hey, Brix! C'mon, guy! Party's over!"
Only one sound came in response. To this day I can't describe it accurately. It was like the peal of tearing cellophane, amplified a thousand times, or the grating rasp a glass cutter makes. It made my teeth twinge and brought every follicle on my body to full alert.
"Carl!" Suzanne was robed and halfway down the stairs.
"Get me a bandage and some peroxide, would you? I've hacked my goddamn foot wide open. Don't go outside. Get my tennis shoes."
I sat down on the second stair with a thump. When Suzanne extracted the trapezoidal chunk of glass, I nearly puked. There was gash two inches wide, leaking blood and throbbing with each slam of my heartbeat. I thought I could feel cold air seeking tiny, exposed bones down there.
"Jesus, Carl." She made a face, as though I'd done this a just to stir up a boring night. "Brixy whiffs a bobcat, or some fucking dog game, and you have to ruin our new floor by bleeding all over it..."
"Something turned him on enough to take out the conservatory window. Jesus Christ in a Handi-Van. Ouch! Even if it is a bobcat, those things are too bad to mess with."
She swept her hair hack, leaving a smear of blood on her forehead. She handed over the peroxide and left my foot half-taped. "You finish. Let me deal with Jilly before she freaks out."
"Mommy?" Jilly's voice was tiny and sleep-clogged. She'd missed the circus. I sure hadn't heard her roll out of the sack, but Suzanne apparently had. Mommy vibes, she'd tell me later.
After gingerly pulling on my shoes, I stumped to the kitchen door and disordered some drawers looking for a flashlight. Upstairs, Suzanne was murmuring a soothing story about how Daddy had himself an accident and fell on his ass.
I didn't have to look far to find Brix. He was gutted and strewn all over the backyard. The first part I found was his left rear leg, lying in the dirt like a gruesome drumstick with a blood-slicked jag of bone jutting from it. My damaged foot stubbed it; pain shot up my ass and blasted through the top of my head. His carcass was folded backward over the east fence, belly torn lengthwise, organs ripped out. The dripping cavern in the top of his head showed me where his brain had been until ten minutes ago.
The metallic, shrieking noise sailed down from the hills.
And the lights were on up at Dunwoody's place.
When the sheriffs told me Brix's evisceration was nothing abnormal, I almost lost it and started punching. Calling the cops had been automatic city behavior; a conditioned reaction that no longer had any real purpose. Atavistic. There hadn't been enough of Brix left to fill a Hefty bag. What wasn't in the bag was missing, presumed eaten. Predators, they shrugged.
In one way I was thankful we'd only had the dog a few days. Jilly was still too young to be really stunned by the loss of him, though she spent the day retreated into that horrible quiet that seizes children on the level Of pure instinct. I immediately promised her another pet. Maybe that was impulsive and wrong, but I wasn't tracking on all channels myself. It did light her face briefly up.
I felt worse for Suzanne. She had been spared most of the visceral evidence of the slaughter, but those morsels she could not avoid seeing had hollowed her eyes and slackened her jaw. She had taken to Brix immediately, and had always militated against anything that caused pain to animals. There was no way to bleach out the solid and sickeningly large bloodstain on the fence, and I finally kicked out the offending planks. Looking at the hole was just as depressing.
The sheriffs were cloyed, too fat and secure in their jobs. All I had done was bring myself to their attention, which is one place no sane person wants to be. Annoyed at my cowardly waste of their time, they marked up my floor with their boots and felt up my wife with their eyes.
Things were done differently here. That was what impelled me to Dunwoody's place, at a brisk limp.
I had not expected Ornily to answer the door; I couldn't fathom what tasks were outside his capabilities and simply assumed he was too stupid to wipe his own ass. He filled up the doorway, immense and ugly, his face blank as a pine plank (with a knot on the flip side, I knew). He was dressed exactly as before. Perhaps he had not changed. It took a couple of long beats, but he did recognize me.
"Fur paw" he said.
The back of my neck bristled. When Ornily's brain changed stations, he haunted the forest, starkers, in the dead of night; what other pastimes might his damaged imagination offer him? When he spoke, I half expected him to produce one of Brix's unaccounted-for shanks from his back pocket and gnaw on it. Then I realized what he had said: For pa.
"Yeah." I tried to clear the idiocy out of my throat. "Is he home.?" "Home. Yuh." He lurched dutifully out of the foyer, Frankenstein's Monster in search of a battery charge.
I waited on the stoop, thinking it unwise to go where I wasn't specifically beckoned or invited. Another urban prejudice. Wait for the protocol, go through the official motions. Put it through channels. That routine was what had won me the white-lipped holes blooming in my stomach.
Dunwoody weaved out of the stale-smelling dimness holding half glass of peppermint schnapps. He was wearing a long-sleeved workshirt with the cuffs buttoned.
"I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Dunwoody, but my dog was killed last night." No reaction. He showed the same disinterest the cops had, and that brought my simmering anger a notch closer to boiling. "More to the point, he was pelted and hung on my back fence with his head scooped out and his guts spread all over the yard. The fence bordering your property, Mr. Dunwoody."
