Dog War (13 page)
Early the next morning, Riccardo ambled out of the French doors onto the lawn, giving Precious her first good daytime look at the pampered brute.
He was the size and shape of an obese baby warthog, with a blunt and bevelled snout and a stumpy body trimmed along the underbelly with a flounce of gray fur. His legs seemed comically stubby for his rotund body, as did his thuggish head buttoned taut at the snout by a chitinous black nose. Tasselled with hairy tufts and antlered with sharpened ears, the dog strutted onto the lawn with the prudish, self-important trot of a centipede.
In the garden Riccardo did what dogs customarily do to perpendicular objects: He raised his leg and sprayed them with fastidious little squirts.
“Enough of de eternal wee-weeing,” Precious scolded. “Come, back to de house. I see you mistress on de porch.”
She turned to head for the porch but the dog stubbornly refused to follow, making his way to another row of stumpy hydrants. Precious trailed after him, clucking, “Stop de foolishness, dog! You think you’s a walking watering can?”
The dog, however, continued willfully on his self-appointed rounds. When he was finally satiated, he kicked up a few clods of grass and trotted briskly across the lawn toward the porch where the mistress sat, wearing a pink peignoir and clutching her head.
“Who invented the jet plane?” the mistress groaned as Precious ambled within earshot.
“De jet plane, mum?” Precious replied, stunned at the abrupt question.
“Yes,” the mistress sighed. “Who in his right mind would invent such a torture chamber? And why do we give in to it? Why did we not fight back? What was your name again?”
Mannish padded onto the veranda, carrying a silver salver on which were balanced a coffee pot and a cup. “Her name is Precious, ma’am.” To Precious he added suavely as he poured the coffee, “The mistress is suffering from jet lag.”
The mistress clutched her head between both hands as if to dramatize her pitiful suffering. Riccardo jumped onto her lap and wound into a furry pile atop her crotch.
“How’s my baby?” cooed the mistress. Riccardo answered by burrowing his nose into her crotch and taking a deep draft.
The mistress giggled and stroked her dog, who responded by streaking her face with his slimy red tongue.
“I am a woman who has been dissected by aviation, Precious, or whatever your name is,” the mistress continued languidly, after she had been thoroughly moistened by dog mouthwater. “My left side is in Paris. My right side is in London. My stomach is in Bangor. But where is my liver? And where is my heart? And where are my kidneys? Can you tell me?”
“All within de skin, mum,” Precious replied scripturally. “Thanks to the plan of God, skin holds us together and keeps everything safely inside. Unless, of course, a madman come and hack you to pieces and fling a piece of you here and another piece dere. Odderwise, where you find skin, inside you will always find organs, all sides, and de eternal soul.”
The mistress heaved a piteous groan and winced, “Mannish, vivisectionist gore so early in the morning?”
“Oh, no, mum! Is de work of God, ma’am,” Precious assured her, interpreting “vivisectionist gore” as the materialist’s rebuttal of Divine Plan.
“Mannish! Otherworldly propaganda before 10 o’clock?”
Mannish made as if to interpose with soothing explanation, when Riccardo unkinked like an awakened snake, leapt down from the mistress’s lap, sidled up to Precious, and spontaneously pumped two strawfuls of yellow wee-wee over her brown shoes.
“De dog wee-wee all over me new shoe!” Precious shrieked with heartfelt horror and disgust, raising her leaking foot to stomp the beast.
Mannish was at Precious’s side in a blink, gripping her elbow in a vice.
“Precious!” he hissed urgently into her earhole.
“Wee-wee dripping between me toe!” Precious howled another blast of revulsion, shaking her feet to drip-dry her toes of dog urine.
“It is not wee-wee!” the mistress said sternly, jumping up and giving Precious a disciplinary shake. “It is love!”
Floored by this revelation, Precious stared down at her splattered feet with momentary bewilderment.
“Don’t be so speciest!” the mistress scolded shrilly, piercing Precious’s eyes with her stare. “Riccardo has no arms for hugging. He has no fingers for caressing. He can only claim you as his own and express his love for you through urination.”
“He has claimed me for his own, too, Precious,” Mannish added grimly, “three times. But it took him nearly a year before he did so the first time.”
“This is what is so remarkable!” the mistress gushed. “Riccardo has fallen in love with you within a matter of hours. Go over and pat him on the head and show that you understand the sign he has given you, that you accept his love.”
Precious was staring confusedly from the mistress to her shoe so rapidly that she felt a muscle spasm in the back of her-neck.
Mannish interposed artfully, “However, I think Precious should first take time to cleanse her feet.”
The mistress shrugged. “Another opportunity for rapprochement between the species lost to petty human hygiene,” she said with palpable disgust. “Go wash your feet.”
She slumped wearily on the lounge, grimacing with a look of dark disappointment.
With Mannish at her side gripping her elbow and helping her along, Precious limped toward her room on tippy toe to prevent her foot bottom from being marinated in dog urine.
“Mannish,” she whispered as soon as they were out of earshot of the porch, “am I mad? Is not wee-wee de dog just spray on me foot?”
“It was indubitably wee-wee,” the factotum confirmed.
“For a little bit I thought I was outta me head. After forty-seven years of life, you just want to believe you can tell de difference between love and wee-wee, you know?”
“Your senses are perfectly sound,” Mannish assured her, giving her arm an encouraging pat as he helped her down the hallway toward her quarters.
“What dat she call me, ‘speciest’? What dat mean?”
“It means you look at the world as a human being does.”
“So how should I look at it, pray?”
“Like a dog.”
“I must drag myself down to de level of dog and look ’pon de world like it fill up with hydrant and bone? For what purpose, please? Dog must raise himself up to
my
level!”
Precious urgently grabbed and held the factotum in her doorway before he could glide off.
“Mannish, if dat dog claim me again, I goin’ kill him dead, so help me.”
“It is over, Precious,” Mannish assured her with another soothing pat. “He has already claimed you. Wash and all will be-well.”
Precious sat on the edge of her tub and washed her feet with scalding water, scrubbing between the toes with a washrag, soaping down instep, insole, and the balls of her feet repeatedly until she was certain that all trace of dog bodily fluid had been cleansed from her person.
She dried off her foot, threw the befouled shoes into the garbage, and returned to the veranda, where, at the mistress’s insistence, she patted Riccardo gingerly on the head to acknowledge the token of liquefied affection he had earlier dumped over her shoes, although the mistress mourned it would have been far better if Precious had reciprocated on the spot, for patting the dog now was like being told, “I love you,” and then replying a month later, “I love you, too.” Nevertheless, Riccardo seemed to understand for he wagged his tail and, as she patted his head, licked Precious plentifully over hand and foot—an experience she likened to being blotted with an uncooked oyster.
“You are a member of this family now, Precious,” the mistress beamed, after Precious had weathered the dog lathering. “Riccardo is an infallible judge of human character. Three days before the market crashed in October 1987, he bit my Merrill Lynch broker. I sold all my stock immediately and made a $25 million profit. I knew that Riccardo never bites without good reason. I told my friends, ‘Riccardo bit my broker, sell your stock immediately.’ They all laughed at me. They don’t laugh anymore. People do learn.” “Yes, mum,” Precious muttered, reluctant to assert what every Christian believer already knew—that the Bible soundly refutes dog bite as a source of true prophecy.
“Sit down and tell me about yourself,” the mistress invited, waving Precious to a chair.
Precious sat down on the veranda, after first peering cautiously at the dog who was still curled up contentedly atop his mistress’s lap. She took a breath and began, starting her narration with her birth in Clarendon one rainy evening in the days when the one parish midwife still rode a donkey. The midwife had to ford two swollen rivers before she could reach the scene of Precious’s birth, and the backward donkey was just getting his front foot damp in river water when the mistress turned glassy-eyed and dozed off. Precious’s head had not yet crowned in the birth canal before the first blast of snoring sounded. Mannish appeared on the veranda and nodded approvingly at Precious, signalling her to keep talking.
Riccardo, however, listened with a impertinent expression riveted on his snout, ignoring Precious’s occasional scowls that were intended to get him to caulk his ears and stop the snooping since a woman’s personal biography was none of any dog’s damn business.
The mistress didn’t look enough like a millionaire to suit Precious, who had expected a flabby old woman with a greedy face soiled by money and stomped on by bird-foot wrinkles. Instead, what she disappointingly got was a middle-aged blond woman whose frame was fashionably strung with modern-day sinew and gristle but whose posture bore a pronounced tilt to the right, possibly, Precious surmised, the result of being knocked out of plumb by a primary schoolteacher’s box and never quite straightening. This constant incline had cocked the mistress’s left eyebrow, giving it the arched look of being jammed on an unfired wink, and clouded her face with an expression of unappetizing quizzicality.
According to Mannish, who told Precious gossipy stories at nights when they shared a few moments of peace and quiet, the mistress had made her money the old-fashioned way: through death and widowhood. She had been married to a man who had invented a useful valve. Precious had only a vague idea of what a valve was and did, but Mannish explained to her that the principle behind a valve was regulation. This appealed to the disciplinary Christian in Precious, who was of the opinion that lack of personal regulation in the world was the chief cause of worldwide smut. Man and woman alike these days could not regulate bad habit, vice, misguided opinion, and wayward appetite, she lectured Mannish, who listened with his inscrutable Coolie face while Precious digressed with a little uplifting postprandial rant in the kitchen.
“Personally, if a woman make her money off regulation, I am for dat. Regulation is important to everyone who professes to be upright and moral.”
“That, however, is not the sort of regulation that a valve performs,” Mannish insisted. “Valves regulate flow. Flow of water. Flow of oil. Flow of liquids and gases. Valves have nothing to do with moral regulation.”
“I am aware of dat, Mister Mannish,” Precious replied sharply. “I am not stupid. I’m just saying dat lack of regulation is de blight on today’s youth.”
Mannish did not know what was the blight on today’s youth; he only knew that the mistress’s husband had invented a valve originally intended for toilets, but it was such a valuable device that its use quickly spread to oil and chemical pumps. The husband patented the device, licensed its manufacture, and then was good enough to drop dead, leaving all his worldly wealth to his bereaved wife.
“But she was not much bereaved,” Mannish added, snippily, “which is why you cannot find a single picture of the dead gentleman in this house.”
Precious rose stoutly to the mistress’s defense.
“Dat’s why I would never marry a Coolie, because you are a people who want woman to sit ’round and do nothing but bawl out her heart and eyewater for you when you dead. Some of you even burn de widow when you dead, as if a woman was nothing but firewood. When you dead, man, you dead. Take it like a man! If you live a wholesome life, you gone to heaven. If you did not live a wholesome life, all de bawling in de world can’t reclaim you from de fiery pit.”
“I am only telling you what I know about the mistress,” Mannish insisted, blinking at this harsh criticism. “I know when I am dead that Beulah will cremate me, even though it is against my wishes. But that is the price I must pay if my soul is to grow.”
“De everlasting Beulah again!” groaned Precious. “Go on with de story.”
“There is little else to tell. Except that the mistress has made many fortunes several times over. Riccardo is her financial advisor. If she is considering an investment, she will invite the broker for a visit. If Riccardo bites him, she will not invest. But if he urinates on the broker’s shoe, she invests a lot. She says that the dog is a prophet who has never been wrong.”
“De dog is a false prophet,” Precious pronounced grimly.
Mannish said he knew nothing about prophets, he only knew that Riccardo had never bitten any broker whose schemes made money. And he had yet to urinate over the shoes of one whose projects had failed.
“How can anybody in deir right mind invest thousands over dog wee-wee?”
“Millions, Precious,” Mannish murmured. “Millions.”
A slab of mansion stillness intruded on their discussion, which they were holding in the cathedral kitchen. Three hallways and a living room deep into the house, as they spoke quietly, the investment dog was snoring on a cotton bone sheet, while his mistress had gone out for a nighttime romp with a-date.
“A madhouse, dis America, you know dat, Mannish!” Precious finally observed, shaking her head with Christian bewilderment. “You ever consider dat dis is a country where everybody mad at de same time, and because of dat, it seem like nobody mad, when in fact, everybody mad?”
Mannish said he hadn’t looked at it that way. He raised his hand to voice philosophical objection when the alarm went off and they saw in the security monitor that a car had pulled into the driveway and that the mistress was being ushered to the front door by her escort.