Beyond Deserving (27 page)

He plans to work on Melroy today.

Melroy is in the center of the yard, tossing a stick with Rowdy, his tight-haired little part-terrier.

“Hey boy,” Melroy yells, and the dog brings back the stick, slobbering with pleasure and pride. “Hey boy,” Melroy says again, watching Gully approach, with sidelong glances away from the dog. He bends to one knee to give the terrier a brisk rub, and endures a drenching of his arm from dog kisses.

Melroy loves an underdog. To him, a mutt has rights effete pedigreed dogs have no claim to. When you were a Depression-era farm boy, and then spent thirty years on oil rigs before heading to the Northwest, you appreciate the dog in the street. You identify.

“You tell me,” Melroy once said to Gully, “how a mutt differs from a Borzoi when his intestines tell him squat?” He can remember dandy bankers, engineers, and journalists from the East, strutting in boomtown bars and streets, feeling high and mighty over the roughnecks and drillers. Melroy always felt more kinship with the whores and bootleggers than the fancy men, and a man who came from oilfield trash knows which animals deserve his attention.

Gully and Melroy first met behind the Cove Country Cafe. Melroy was at the back door, sorting through a bin of garbage. Gully was driving through the alley as a turnaround. Anybody would have misunderstood the case. There was Melroy in red longjohns and baggy denim pants, a watch-cap and knee-high rubber boots. Gully pulled the truck around to the side and came back on foot. It was a dull day so far, and here was a man in need of a hand.

“I'll buy you coffee,” he offered. “And a donut—” With still no reaction from the old man, Gully added, “—and an egg.”

Melroy began to laugh. It didn't seem he would ever stop. Gully followed him back to his trailer and spent most of that day with him, missing lunch and causing himself grief with Geneva later on. “I did live on beans and cornbread once for two weeks,” Melroy told him. “A driller left town without paying us, and all I had was a sack of pintos and one of cornmeal. Can't stand the sight of pintos ever since, though I'll still eat a white bean.” He listened with interest as Gully launched into a story about dissipation and madness and his great good fortune to come to his senses just in time, but had nothing to comment in return. As soon as Gully wound down, he took him out in the yard to feed the dogs and talk about the difference in the game of Northwest and Southwest, which led to livelier tales of drenched hunting trips, wily deer, favorite shotguns. Such talk fed friendship.

Gully calls out a hello. The dogs set up a howling. Melroy yells at them to mind their manners. It is too hot for much movement, so they settle down. There is one fat wienie dog that runs as fast as her stubby legs will carry her, up to Melroy. She pushes herself up against one of his legs, takes a stand between his ankles, raises a back leg, and pees.

Melroy steps wide away to avoid the spray, and shakes his head. “That Haggerty. I named her for my son, who was named for his mother's brother, all of them shy dogs. Course there's nothing mean nor little in Haggerty, only those dumb sawed-off legs, whereas my son learned early on to be sneaky, to make up for what he don't have nerve enough to do up front. Come in, Gully. Good to see you.”

“I brought lunch.” Gully carries a paper bag from the cafe, with chicken sandwiches, two fat pickles, and two silly sacks with about five potato chips in each. He had his thermos filled with coffee.

“Will you look at that,” says Melroy when Gully lays the food out on the table. There is hardly room for it. Melroy has bottles lined up two deep on the side along the wall, a fresh batch of his home-brewed beer. There are newspapers, a Farmer's Almanac, a dictionary so worn the cloth binding is frayed white at the edges, socks brought in from drying and not put away, a needle stuck in a card wound with thread, and other odds and ends.

Melroy's half-retriever, half-something-smaller, Bounder, has been sleeping under the table. True to his name, he jumps all over both men, slathering and nosing them, whapping his tail around, knocking over a cup and a glass on the floor by a chair.

“I made a mistake with Bounder,” Melroy says. He pats the dog until he lies back down. He opens up his sandwich and lays chips on it, neatly overlapping. He closes it back up and sits down in his rocker. “I got him young, last winter. Bad timing. Long rainy days. Cold. You stay inside, and a silly pup like that crawls all over you, licks and laps and climbs, and then the durned thing is set for life. It's habitual. Thinks this trailer is his. Thinks I'm his pet. Doesn't give a hoot for the other dogs.”

Haggerty has come to the front door and is whining loudly. “And that pest!” says Melroy in mock exasperation. He still has not had a bite of his sandwich. “Scared to be by himself, scared little turd of a dog. That's why I let him sleep inside. I had raccoons all over the place last year, till I finally moved that durned dog food over to the other side of the creek. Haggerty liked to collapse when they came rummaging around. Course they were big as polar bears, don't you know?”

Gully moves to the door and lets the dog inside. Haggerty runs around in a circle, then huddles in a hump between Melroy's legs. Gully sinks into an old green easy chair with wide, flat arms.

In a moment, Haggerty waddles over and jumps to put her paws on the edge of the cushion. “She wants to show you she can say her prayers,” Melroy says. “We've been working on that. You just tell her to. Go on, you'll see.”

“Well, then, say your prayers, Haggerty.” Gully has had dogs of his own. He has thrown sticks, played hide and seek, done a little jumping. But his dogs never said prayers.

Sure enough Haggerty moves her front paws together and bows her head. She makes a squeaking noise.

“Good dog,” Gully says. Haggerty slides away, down into a lump again at Melroy's feet.

The men chew contentedly for a few moments. Gully is relieved to see Melroy eat. He knows that if Melroy could open to a spiritual connectedness, and eliminate destructive behavior, he could become whole, healthy, and serene. It might take a while, but Melroy is a good man, garrulous but mild.

“I forgot the coffee,” Gully says. Melroy motions for him to stay put while he washes two mugs and fills them from Gully's thermos. He takes a long noisy drink as he sits down, then another which he sloshes around his mouth before swallowing.

“My first cup of the day,” Melroy says. “Just never got around to it this morning. I fed the dogs and exercised them, shoved a little dung aside, and then there you are. Life goes fast at my age.” He says this as though he were talking to a kid, instead of a man within a few years of the same birth date. He pulls his boots off and Bounder nestles closer, putting his side to good use as a foot cushion for Melroy. Gully watches Melroy work his toes in Bounder's fur. If Melroy didn't have his dogs, he'd hardly have a reason to get up of a morning. Only, he does have them, and you have to admit they all get along.

Peace of mind can have eccentric definitions, Gully thinks. Melroy is not an unhappy man. If he set about inventorying his life, making amends to others, who would he need to make amends
to
?

All of that being Melroy's own business.

“I don't believe there's a dog you wouldn't have, is there?” Gully asks. “Except the fancy ones.”

“Don't want no mouthers,” Melroy answers. He puts his half-eaten sandwich on the table. “I don't mind a tug-of-war now and then with an old sock. All my dogs like that. But when I see a Doberman or a Shepherd, I look close for that mouthing habit. That kind of dog's likely to have had an owner who called it Fang or Killer. You can tell right away if you know what to look for. I don't want no part of a dog like that. Too hard to undo, and I've got my other dogs to think of. Other problems you can solve. It'd be boring if they came to you neatly trained like goldarned cadets. When I first got that little beagle out there, say, he was a shit-eater. That was a hard one to break, but you wouldn't know it now unless I told you. I can see him now and then looking at a crap pile in a studied way. I just shake my bean can at him real hard. I think he does it to tease me. To keep his place in line, don't you know?”

Gully, full and comfortable, feels like never moving. He is used to the dog smell already. He wonders if Melroy ever thinks about making a little visit to Texas again. He has always had a mind to see the Big Bend park, maybe float down a river.

He wishes Melroy would finish his sandwich.

“I don't believe in a dog's spite,” Melroy says. He likes to chat. Gully doesn't know who else visits him. “I had two wives, and both of them spiteful as a lemon is sour, but a dog does what it has to when it's cornered. I'm not talking Marine Corps dogs, Nazis, drug sniffers. I'm talking mongrels. What does a mongrel know about politics and spite? I had the cutest little spaniel once. We was living in Blanco, Texas. I called her Sugar. She was yard-trained as good as any dandy dog, but my wife would ignore her wanting out, till Sugar would find a corner and let it plop, whining and feeling so goldarned bad about it. Wife said it was spite. One night I was working, and the wife went to the movies without letting Sugar out. Wife got home before me and found the dog had done her business right in one of the wife's shoes. When I got home, wife said, ‘That goddamned dog don't like me, Austin. It's me or her.'” He grins and scratches his head. “That was my second wife.”

“I've been married fifty years,” Gully says. It sounds exaggerated, spoken plain and bald like that.

“That a fact?” Melroy says mildly. “But no dogs.”

“Not right now,” says Gully. He is embarrassed. When you think about it, life isn't all there if you don't have a dog. But their mongrel retriever died years ago, and when Gully mentioned going to the pound to look for another dog, Geneva said the trailer was too small, her voice entirely final on the subject. Gully would keep a dog in the shop, or with him when he is out in the truck, but he didn't argue. He hadn't really wanted the dog all that bad, had he? He can't think what he has wanted very much in a long time.

“I've been considering it,” he says now. This is news to him, but it rings true.

“Pick of the litter,” Melroy says, and guffaws. He swings his arm around to indicate the yardful. “Whenever you get serious. I mean it, Gully. Bounder'd keep you good company. Or Haggerty. You could bring her out.”

Gully is staring at the beer bottles, and Melroy catches him at it. “Want to try one?”

“Not me,” Gully says. “You know me, Melroy. I can't drink. I'm, you know—”

“Yea, yea. But this is home brew, mild as mother's tit. We could split a bottle and it wouldn't be half the kick of a spoon of cough syrup.”

Gully never thinks about the taste of beer or whiskey. He never really thinks, I wish I had a drink. But he feels bad, turning Melroy down. It seems impolite. It seems stiff. Maybe Melroy doesn't lead a fit life, but he is an easy man to like, and he sure is an independent one.

“Nothing like what I learned to drink when I was still a kid,” Melroy says. “What hootch that was! I ever tell you?”

Gully shakes his head. He doesn't think he ought to encourage this line of talk, but he is interested. Men their age have a broader experience with liquor than kids today, despite all those foreign beers in fancy bottles.

“It was in Van Zandt County. Little bitty town. They had a Texas Ranger lived there, and lots of Bible belt believers. But they had dance halls and hell-raisers too, like any boomtown. I was a dopey damned farm kid, thrilled to death with the company and the money. My folks were about starving, and here I was making decent wages. The guys called me “Shortstop,” and “Weevil,” and “Kiddo.” They called each other stronger names than that. I had been drinking home-brewed beer with them when one night we got hold of some of the bad piss got sold around there, this one batch was made of denatured alcohol. Some men died. Some got this jerky walk we called Jake-leg. You'd hear about it on rigs ever after. Everybody knew about Jake-leg. Me and my friends had got full on beer, we didn't drink much of the rotgut. We got sick and recovered. We didn't get Jake-leg.”

“I've heard what moonshine can do.”

“Dishonest moonshine. Those fellers are probably all dead now. Weevil. Hah. 1930, it was, or '31. Where were you, Gully?”

“Making my way, same as you.” It only takes a moment to remember clearly. The past is like a fruit tree for plucking. He had a job with a railroad survey party for the Bureau of Public Roads, courtesy of his stepfather's position. He smiles, remembering.

“It's a stingy man who recollects in silence, Gully,” Melroy says. He opens one of the beers with a flourish.

It must be warm, Gully thinks. He says, “One of the other young men and I set off on a Sunday on a hand-pump car, right up into the wilderness, with a picnic lunch and a cadged bottle of something my friend called whiskey, a word it did not deserve. We had a good time and got a little juiced, and then set off downhill for the ride home. We got sick of pumping, and realized that, going downhill, you could let the handles go. What neither of us thought about was that you couldn't get the handles back once the speed picked up. We had to bail out, and the hand-car went airborne and flew right into camp. It was a near disaster.” Suddenly self-conscious, Gully feels his face flame. He is acting like an old man, Geneva would say. She doesn't like to hear about exploits that don't include her.

“If I had the patience with a pencil, I'd write my memwars,” Melroy says. He passes the bottle to Gully, who takes it without thinking. “It's a good thing to have youth to look back on. Makes you glad you didn't grow up stiff and sober like a goldarned preacher's kid. Makes you glad you did a little living back when, don't it?”

Gully takes a long drink. It takes a moment for the taste to register, the funny yeasty tickle at the back of his throat, the long lick of liquid down his gullet. He feels it spread to the back of his head, behind his ears.