Dog War (17 page)

“No tongue in earhole, please,” she said gruffly enough for him to grasp that he had strayed out of bounds.

After much wooing and cajoling and cuddling with her deep into the night, Mannish perched on a narrow strip on the edge of the bed from which he proceeded to conduct a thoroughly satisfying feel-up of all relevant body parts.

“I am a Christian woman,” Precious muttered as a reminder as much to herself as to him, shivering with delight as one particular probe deliciously struck water.

“I know that, Precious,” his whisper respectfully assured her. “That is why I intend to use a brand-new condom.”

She said, “Oh,” the best she could manage on the spur of the moment.

As he mounted her she begged pardon and briefly took time out to turn Theophilus’s portrait facedown on the table next to her bed to spare her late husband the distress of witnessing her backsliding carnality when he no doubt already had enough on his mind with learning and rehearsing the angelic hymnal.

“Are you ready, Precious?” Mannish asked huskily, puffing cottonballs softly in the creases of her neck.

Thank you, yes, she was quite ready. Theophilus had been cold now for nearly a year. Burning atop her bosom was a hot-blooded young man, mounted where only emptiness and homesickness had lately ridden.

Her heart was a child with a skip rope.

When Precious awoke the next morning, she drew sweet breath, walked with a sprightly step into the massive doublejointed kitchen. As she warbled through the kitchen preparing breakfast for man and dog, she found herself pausing to stretch and crack her joints of lingering bubbles of sleep, savoring to the full the satisfaction of having reduced a grown man to insensibility against her bosom last night, teaching once again the usual grim lesson about the transitoriness of lust. When she was done with Mannish last night, she was proud to say, not even mythic Beulah herself could have roused a strand of his pubic hair.

She hummed a hymn and mixed a batch of thick waffle batter. Mistress Lucy strolled into the kitchen, accepted a cup of coffee from Precious, and read the newspapers in the strained morning silence that always follows nighttime domestic uproar. Precious thought to mention the row of the night before but decided against it, so other than the obvious burbling about “Morning,” neither of them said a word.

Dressed in his uniform, Mannish joined them a half an hour later, his cheeks glowing under a fresh coat of varnish, a schoolboy’s glint in his eyes. He sipped a cup of coffee near Precious, who hummed triumphantly under her breath.

Riccardo trotted into the kitchen, heading straight for Precious, when he suddenly stopped, peered suspiciously up at Mannish, and growled.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” Mistress Lucy crooned.

The dog flicked his glance at her, telegraphed a greeting with a perfunctory wag of his tail, and returned his attention to Mannish with a deeper, angrier growl. Startled, Precious stared down guiltily at him for she knew instinctively what the growl meant. It was a dog reproach for, “Why you give dat Coolie my pum-pum?” asked in such an ill-mannered tone that she felt the rash impulse to bend down and box his face.

“What on earth is wrong with you, Riccardo?” the mistress wondered, reaching down to scoop up her pet. But even settled in her lap, the dog still glared and snarled at Mannish, who feigned indifference.

“Maybe he want a cheese omelet this morning,” Precious suggested hopefully.

“Mannish, are you sure you bought unfertilized eggs?” Mistress Lucy worried, massaging Riccardo behind the ears.

“Oh, yes, Miss Johnston,” Mannish said suavely. “The hens haven’t seen a cock since birth!”

Precious clucked sympathetically and headed for the refrigerator.

Covetous dog eyes tracked her progress.

Chapter 19

“Mummy, how you get yourself in these predicaments, eh?” Shirley asked with that scolding look of perplexity a middleaged mother dreads to see in a grown daughter. Precious heaved a sigh and twiddled her thumbs with mortification.

It was Sunday, her day off, and Precious was visiting Shirley. The two grandchildren, having just returned from Sunday school, had cavorted off into the nearby woods, seeking respite from biblical morbidness. Henry was pottering in the kitchen, baking a cake, leaving Precious and Shirley briefly alone in the living room, where Precious had just told of her scrapes with the dog.

“I did nothing to encourage dis animal!” Precious declared indignantly.

Shirley got up and paced with official police briskness, dodging between sofa and chair and ending up staring out the window with her back to her mother. She posed briefly there before snapping her fingers with sudden decisiveness.

“I’ll run over him for you with my patrol car. I was in hot pursuit. A dog darted into the street, and I ran over him. The suspect escaped. Your troubles are over.”

“Murder?” Precious gasped. “You want to murder de dog?”

“Now you talking like an American! You don’t
murder
a dog. You run over a dog. Can you let him out tomorrow evening around 8:00? I’ll run over him for you then.”

Precious gestured irritably. “You take dis for a joke,” she grumbled.

“If I miss him with the car, I’ll just lean out the window and plug him. You can say that the dog was a victim of drive-by shooting.”

Precious shook her head. She would not be a party to murder. If the dog happened to be out in the street for a stroll and Shirley just chanced to come by and felt like running him over on her own accord, that was different.

“You stay there going on fenky-fenky,” Shirley declared scornfully, “until the dog hold you down and rape you.”

“A dog can’t rape a woman, Shirley! Use your brain!”

“A Jamaican dog, maybe. But an American dog damn well-can.”

“Listen, don’t bother with de everlasting American patriotism dis morning! I have enough trouble already.”

There was a pause in the conversation while respective digestion of opinion, word, and topic silently took place.

Precious stirred, sighed, and grumbled. “To tell you the truth, I-want to go home. It’s getting so me nerves can’t stand dis place again. I have a headache ever since I come to dis country. Murder, stabbing, shooting morning, noon, and night. Man going berserk in schoolyard and supermarket. Gunman barricading inside house. Woman murdering her husband over a talking parrot. Alien breeding Arizona housewife of two-headed baby. Bigfoot begging bus fare off hikers in Oregon. I can’t stand it anymore! I not even eating right. You don’t see how I lose weight? Ten pounds, straight off me batty, you father’s favorite part. Thank God he’s not alive today, he’d go look a young fat gal. Why can’t I just dead now and be happy, eh? Instead, Theophilus Higginson, the most miserable man on two foot, get to dead and be safe and happy, while I have to stay here on earth, alive and miserable!”

“Mummy! Leave the fool-fool job. Come back and live with us! You don’t need to work.”

Shirley’s earnest plea was still ringing in the air when Henry sauntered in on the conversation.

“Precious,” he asked eagerly, “are you coming back to live with us?”

“Not quite yet,” she said dryly.

“Mummy, mind the dog don’t hold you down, you know!”

Henry’s head swivelled excitably from mother to daughter.

“Dog? What dog? What’re you talking about?”

“You wait till I reunite with your father in Paradise, you’ll see the good kick I going give him for leaving me in dis predicament.”

“Are you guys talking Jamaican dialect?”

“Speaking of Daddy, you never did tell me who Brutus is.”

“Mercy!”

“I’m not understanding one word of this conversation, people!”

Days of tension and disagreeable scene followed. The dog began to park himself outside Precious’s door every night, whimpering to be let in until Mistress Lucy herself had to come and cart him off to her own boudoir. One morning the mistress opined to Mannish that the dog was such a victim of an insidious
idée fixe
that she wondered whether Precious had put Jamaican voodoo on the poor animal.

“What is the meaning of this
idée fixe
?” Mannish asked with polite bewilderment.

“It means an obsession. Riccardo is obviously obsessed with the Jamaican bitch.” She added gloomily, “I blame myself.”

“You should not blame yourself, Miss Johnston. The dog is only obeying his karma.”

“He got this sick obsessiveness from me. I am the same way. When a man wants me, I kick him. But when a man doesn’t want me, I screw him until he does. Then I kick him.”

Mannish sniffed with circumspection. “It is a most peculiar contrariness,” he said adroitly.

“That’s why I’m doomed to one night stands. Once a man finds out that I’m rich, he always begins snivelling. If I could only meet a fabulously rich man who hated me! I’d kiss his ass, give him healthy children, and be happy. If he worked at hating me, the relationship would last forever. Of course, once he had a lapse and started to love me, I’d kick him, and it’d be over.”

Mannish scratched his chin and tried to look philosophical.

“So here I am, in my own kitchen,” Mistress Lucy added with a shudder of self-abasement, “confiding all this to my Indian chauffeur. No wonder poor Riccardo is so neurotic.”

One morning shortly after this heart-to-heart talk between mistress and chauffeur, an ugly scene occurred. Precious was cooking in the kitchen, moaning inwardly about the hardship of boiling soup without a beefy bone. The mistress was at the kitchen table, poring over financial records. Mannish was waxing the Rolls Royce in the courtyard. Riccardo was curled up near Precious’s feet, darting lewd glances at her potbellied figure and every now and again wheezing with a lovelorn groan.

“Precious,” the mistress said impatiently, “for God’s sake, will you please pat Riccardo? Don’t you hear him moaning?”

With a forbearing sigh, Precious bent over and briefly dusted the crown of the dog’s head, flattening a sprig of fur that sprouted between his sharpened ears. Just then Mannish entered the kitchen. Riccardo growled and jumped up to hover protectively beside Precious.

“It is very hot outside,” Mannish declared to the kitchen at large, pouring himself a glass of water.

As if to reply, Riccardo trotted briskly over to the chauffeur and signed his right leg with a flamboyant twirl of piss. Mannish froze. “Riccardo has christened me,” he hissed between clenched teeth.

The mistress glanced up with a bemused shaking of her head. “He feels loving today. Must be the heat.”

“If I live for ten millennia,” Mannish grimaced, “I will know never to steal another man’s camels. I have learned my lesson for eternity.”

Stalking out of the kitchen, he limped toward his room above the garage.

Mistress Lucy glanced up distractedly. “What was that all about?”

“I don’t know, mum.” Precious dropped the kitchen towel on the floor, bent over to pick it up, and whispered vehemently at the dog, “Piss ’pon my foot today and is the last foot you piss ’pon on dis earth.”

With a nimble thrust of its head, the dog dug deep into her right earhole with its tongue. Precious shrieked and bolted upright as if sprung violently out of a box.

Mistress Lucy looked up peevishly.

“Now what?”

“You cannot butcher and eat the dog, and dat’s final. Now stop talking about it.”

Precious was in no mood for mincing words. Mannish was brooding in her room, slumped in a chair beside her bed. On a side table lay the butcher knife she had just forcefully extracted from his hand. The mistress had gone to a formal dinner with her date, and three distant hallways away Riccardo was scratching at the door of his bedroom in which Precious had contrived to entrap him. When she had answered the soft knock on her door and found Mannish standing there, Precious naturally assumed that the chauffeur had come to beg her another piece, which she was quite agreeable to giving, provided he was prepared to suffer brief Christian resistance. But instead, she found that he’d come to enlist her help in a harebrained scheme to butcher and cook the dog tonight while the mistress was away.

“I cannot stand it anymore, Precious.” The chauffeur slumped in the chair, looking miserable. “I just cannot bear to be pissed on anymore.”

“Be a man! Just tell yourself dat you are the one with the-soul.”

“Yes. You are quite right. I must get ahold of myself.” With a disciplined shudder, he seemed to regain his self-control. “So, how are you feeling nowadays?”

Precious shrugged to indicate eternal bowing to God’s will. “Nearly five thousand in the bank. Black market rate is now-fifty-nine dollars with hopes for sixty dollars to one coming up. I soon go home-now.”

Mannish leaned over her chair and kissed her tenderly. “I-am praying for a fall in this black market rate. I will miss you very much.”

After he had spent an hour of sincere, respectable begging, Precious’s conscience was clear enough to permit dignified removal of her panties.

A few moments later, as they were passionately entwined abed, the dog erupted in a hellish, amplified howling that pulsated in ghoulish waves down the darkened hallways.

“It is the hound of the Baskervilles,” Mannish stopped to mutter darkly.

“Forget the dog, man!” Precious panted urgently.

“Sorry.”

Mannish returned stoutly to his labors, but he soon faltered; so unnerved was he by the unremitting howling that within seconds he was wriggling atop her slippery and naked like a stranded eel.

“Precious,” he groaned, “I am so sorry. I can think of nothing but this ghastly howling.”

Precious sighed. With encouraging words and pats, she slid the wilted chauffeur off her bosom and ushered him under cover of face-saving darkness to her bedroom door. Pausing in the open doorway, they could hear salvos of beastly howls whistling down the dim hallways and splattering in the empty living room. Mannish was so self-reproachful and nervous that he hadn’t even dressed, and it was all Precious could do to calm his apologetic babbling and send him trudging down the hall, forlornly dragging after him a useless pair of crumpled pants. She watched until the wiggle of his brown batty had been blotted up by the household dimness before quietly closing her-door.