Dog War (19 page)
Precious sniffed and asked one picky question. “Who, pray, going get out of the Rolls Royce and stoop down on the sidewalk pavement to look up dog batty and see if de bitch in heat?”
“I will be doing the driving, Precious,” Mannish mumbled defensively. “Riccardo is not after me.”
“I am not looking up no dog batty on de street corner, Mister Mannish Chaudhuri! I am a forty-eight-year-old Christian grandmother!”
The next day the dog came down with an ear infection. Precious had been indignantly wondering when creation would take righteous retribution against the lecherous mongrel, so she blurted out a jubilant “Hallelujah!” at this infestation of heaven-sent ear bacteria and chortled another triumphant cry when the veterinarian’s medication reduced the beast to a zombie, making him too weak to even grind a big-toe.
So she had a few days of peace and quiet when no dog padded under the overhang of her batty or tried to copulate with her shinbone, and she was free to make leisurely plans for returning to Jamaica.
On the third morning she was feeling such unaccustomed contentment that when she made her way early into the kitchen she was humming a hymn and didn’t even notice the mistress clad in a hairy coat and installed in her customary place at the breakfast table with Riccardo curled up at her feet. Nor did she spot the reckless glint that lighted up in the mistress’s eyes at her approach.
Precious was running water for breakfast tea before she became aware of the mistress. She started and murmured apologetically, “Morning, mum. Nice coat.”
“It’s a mink,” the mistress snapped impatiently.
Precious said that she never knew and muttered something to the effect that before she had her morning tea she couldn’t tell mink from mango, for her eyes did not adjust to morning light as well as they used to before her senses had become bogged down in middle age.
“Precious, I am wearing an animal pelt!” the mistress cried, stamping her foot.
Precious heaved a sigh and puzzled about what she was expected to say, when Mannish blustered into the kitchen, glanced at the mink, and gasped that he felt faint. Reeling dizzily, he grabbed for the nearest neckback, which belonged to Precious, nearly toppling her onto the floor.
Precious shrieked and clutched at the kitchen counter to steady herself, while Riccardo brayed a sickly growl and staggered up before imploding in a pile of dog joint and fur on the kitchen floor.
Mistress Lucy beamed at the excitement.
What they were witnessing, Mistress Lucy declared as she sashayed around the kitchen like the Queen of Sheba, was the only moral mink coat in the world. Here she paused, giving Mannish the opportunity to express his shock by shamming hyperventilation.
Every animal from which the coat had been made, continued the mistress, had been hand-butchered by God.
Precious squawked, “God is nobody’s butcher, Mistress Lucy! Burn me to de stake, but I still maintain as much.”
Mistress Lucy said nobody was going to burn anybody to the stake this morning, thank you. The phrase only meant that no pelt in the coat had been removed until the mink had suffered freely visited organic death. And before the pelt was removed, an autopsy was conducted to determine that the animal had been felled by such God-given disease as wholesome heart attack or natural stroke. The coat came with miniaturized death certificates signed by a veterinarian certifying that it was made of one hundred percent organic-death pelts, all profits being recycled to provide an Edenic environment for future mink generations. What could be more humane? And with God being the sole butcher …
“Mistress Lucy!” Precious protested. “Almighty God is no butcher!”
“So if man isn’t killing the mink, who is?” Mistress Lucy asked, toying with her maid.
“Nature, mum.”
“And who do Christians say made nature?”
“De devil, mum. De coat is a demon coat.”
The mistress glared at Precious with contempt and ordered Mannish to call and arrange for her jet plane to be ready to leave that morning. She was personally going to tour this breakthrough mink farm in North Dakota and see for herself how it was managed, for it was simply too utopian to be believed. If-she liked what she saw, she intended to buy it.
With that she scooped up Riccardo and stalked out of the kitchen.
Mannish exhaled wearily. “Precious, why must you always crush another soul’s happiness?”
“What a way you catch you breath all of a sudden!” Precious rejoined sarcastically.
“I must have a place to live while I am awaiting Beulah,” Mannish mumbled apologetically. “It will not be easy for me later, atoning for the stolen camels.”
“Praise God I soon depart from dis madhouse!”
So the mistress went away to North Dakota, leaving behind an ailing Riccardo even though Precious tried to inveigle her into taking the dog along on the trip. But the mistress said no, she did not want to take a chance on hurting Riccardo, whom she kissed full on the mouth before she flounced out of the room bawling for Mannish to come and carry her luggage. Then she was gone and Precious was left ogling the dog sprawled on his mistress’s bed.
“You better not trouble me while de mistress is away,” Precious warned the animal, aiming a stern finger at his head.
The dog stirred, looked up at her with rheumy eyes, and blew bad breath all over her finger.
And things went well that first day, for Riccardo was still groggy from the medicine. Precious ushered him through a halfhearted turn around his favorite hydrants and fed him an early supper. Then she turned down his capacious bed and the dog jumped onto it, curled up in its middle, and fell quickly asleep.
But by two days later, the dog had become frisky again. Twice on the second day of the mistress’s absence he treed Precious on the breakfast table with his aggressive wooing.
The mistress called repeatedly, inquiring if Riccardo was well, and one time Precious had to bring the dog to the telephone so the mistress could coax him into giving her a bedtime bark.
After that telephone call, Precious managed to entice the dog into his bedroom early in the evening and hurriedly slam the door on him, causing the brute to begin an impassioned howling that jangled her nerves and made her hands shake. Mannish suggested that they go out in the Rolls Royce and have dinner, leaving the beast to howl himself to death.
They had wine. They shared deep talk. They chatted about the mistress and her eccentric ways. They drove home languidly in the Rolls Royce. And when they got back to the darkened mansion they heard howls still bellowing in the mansion’s darkened rooms, rattling throughout the emptiness of the house with a ghoulish hollowness. It would be impossible for her to sleep with such a racket, Mannish said, she should come and stay in his quarters above the garage, where no dog howling could reach her ears.
Precious was reluctant at first, for she did not wish to pass the whole night with a man to whom she was not married, but eventually the dog howling upset her nerves so much that she followed the chauffeur into his quarters, where he promptly began to beg her a grind.
She hesitated, confessing that she was getting tired of giving grind to a sinner. It would be all right if she felt that he had prospects of salvation, but she thought it improper to be constantly giving grind to a man who had never been baptized. Mannish swore fervently that he was prepared to repent and convert on the spot. Precious said that he shouldn’t make a joke of it because that would only make the fire hotter, but Mannish assured her that he was not joking.
One thing led to another, and after Mannish had endured some more chastening talk about his disbelieving ways, he ended up naked atop her belly. Once he had settled there she promptly forgot religion and set about the worldly task of reducing him to the usual dribbling nub. He fell asleep at her side, his lips nibbling idly on her right nipple.
She was going to box him for this, but she held her hand. It-was needless, this nibbling, which to Precious’s thinking meant that it was most likely a sin. A pre-grind nibble was workmanlike and necessary; but a post-grind nibble was a hoggish wallowing. However, for the time being, since Mannish was still unsaved, she would permit him to nibble sleepily at her nipple, thinking with a grim sniff that he had better enjoy it now because his nibbling days were numbered.
She had had a change of heart and had decided that she would not quit the mansion. She would remain and suffer lewd dog courtship for the sake of her lover. Under her watchful eye Mannish would be born again, and she would personally save his soul. There would be no backsliding, either, for once she saved a soul it stayed saved.
She was dreamily thinking of the regimen she intended to put him under when she fell asleep.
Sometime later that night Precious awoke on Mannish’s bed to the noise of an unearthly snoring that her ears could not believe blew out the small nosehole of a Coolie. It sounded like two-baby mules were stuffed up his nostrils with each trying to out-snort the other, using nosehole as a makeshift echo chamber. She elbowed Mannish onto his side and the left mule stopped its snorting while the right one sounded an ugly bray of undeserved victory.
Precious raised herself on her elbow to look out the open window above the bed at a clear and cloudless night sky with metallic yellow light purling through the crescent slit of a new moon. The air was brisk and sweet with nighttime scents and starlight sparkle, and through the window she could see the darkened sweep and breadth of the mansion’s gardens shimmering in the night breeze. She could not sleep beside a man who made such atrocious noises, so she fumbled with a sigh for her clothes that he had considerately removed and neatly folded in a tidy cocoon at the foot of the bed.
Frock was there, wrapped protectively around slip and brassiere. Burrowed deep inside the pile were her fallen panties. She stood up beside the bed, intending to dress, and glanced curiously at the night sky.
That was when an idea stunned her: Why bother dress?
Precious had been living in a mansion now for nearly a year and had yet to walk naked among its arrayed splendors. She had not walked naked through the front yard, the backyard, the side yard with its ornamental rose gardens and flagstone paths. She had never walked naked through the corpulently furnished living room, the sinewy picture-lined hallways, the dining room crammed with the formal props and implements of decorative gluttony.
Now it was true, and Precious grasped this immediately, that no one in Jamaica upon learning of her life in an American mansion would ever pass a catty remark about her fainthearted failure to walk naked through a mansion’s drawing room when she had had the chance. And it was also true that she herself would never boast even to relatives that hers was the only batty in the family to have ever strolled bare through a mansion.
Yet the idea of standing, of walking, or perhaps even performing a languid ballerina pirouette naked inside a mansion was one she found so utterly exciting that it made her shiver.
Years later, when she looked back on this moment, Precious would wonder how a woman of her upbringing could have fallen prey to such a depraved thought, and the only sensible explanation she could give was that the human heart was a cave hung with dark, upside-down impulses. One had taken wing and flown into her brain while her senses were still under the spell of that false prophet, hood.
Before her better nature could take arms against this impure whim, she had collected her clothes, tiptoed through the dark room, and stepped ecstatically out the door and into the nighttime coolness.
She stood naked on the top of the stairs, drew an exhilarating breath, and surveyed the darkened land shimmering under the waxy light dripping from the chinky new moon. The nighttime air trickled over her batty and poured a moist coolness into every body crack. Darkness daubed damply at her breasts, and the moment held a raw deliciousness that made her tingle.
Carefully, looking warily at every step, she made her way down the stairs and padded across the brick surface of the backyard and into the house. She entered through the kitchen door, closed it softly behind her with a furtive click, and poised there swaddled in the household shadows.
One deep cleansing breath, and she had ghosted into the drawing room, and slowly, majestically—or so she fantasized—was executing a pirouette of triumph beside an ornate coffee table when suddenly a stumpy shadow lurched out from under the banquet table and a tongue stabbed deep into her batty crack, greasing it with oily mouthwater.
Precious shrieked, for she had a delirious sense that the coffee table had slimed her with a netherworld nighttime tongue. She jumped backwards in the darkness with a second cry of horror answered by an implacable growl and the fierce grip of her legs between hairy tentacles.
“Riccardo!” Precious screamed, dimly understanding. “Stop it! How you get out? Leggo me foot!”
She bolted down the hallway, tripped on the edge of an Oriental rug, and sprawled facedown on the floor. With a frenzied growl, the dog sprang atop her fleshy buttocks and began pumping, and she felt some hideously slimy puncheon ice-picking dimples into her batty cheeks. She rolled over on her back, flailing with her arms and legs at the thrusting, probing, licking animal whose turgid belly drummed with a ravenous growling.
“Help! Murder! Police!” Precious bawled. “Dog grind!”
Screaming, she wedged her leg under the pulsating underbelly of the snarling beast and, giving a mighty heave, shot him spinning toward the ceiling as from a catapult.
She did not hear him fall or thud, but suddenly the room pulsed with only the rasp of her own convulsed wheezing.
She scrambled to her feet and fled down the hall. Then she stopped to breathlessly listen, darted down the hallway through the elegant drawing room, and sprinted out into the backyard and up the stairs above the garage. She scrambled to Mannish’s bedside, hysterically slapping at the chauffeur and shaking him awake.
Mannish sat up groggily, while she babbled incoherently about “attempted dog grind.” He tumbled after her down the rattling stairs and into the living room, which he blasted with a garish overhead light and, while Precious shielded her eyes and blubbered at him to protect her from dog rape, stalked cautiously over to a far corner of the room.