Dog War (20 page)
He strolled calmly to her side. “Precious,” he exploded in a gleeful laugh. “The beast is dead! Thanks be to Krishna!”
He added the observation, almost as a polite filler in the stunned silence, “Precious, you are naked.”
“Is
you
take off me clothes!” she shrieked, desperate to implicate another culprit in her crime. “Is
you
peel off every stitch of clothing off me body!”
She was cowering in a corner, her hands trembling uncontrollably, her eyes owlishly gaping.
“Lawd!” she screeched hysterically, indignantly, “you drop de tin can ’pon me head again!”
Precious hurried back to Jamaica that very day. She departed in-a fit of hysterics, trailing behind her an unremitting flow of babbled explanations and justifications which Mannish assured her were unnecessary, for he thought it quite splendid that she had killed the stinking dog and if she would only not be hasty he was sure he could concoct some explanation of the dog’s demise to satisfy the mistress. But Precious panicked, convinced that once the mistress discovered her dog was dead she would run right out and book a freelance gunman to kill her Jamaican maid. She begged the chauffeur to say how long he thought it would take the mistress to hire a murderer through a magazine advertisement as she had seen on a television show. Mannish denied that the mistress would ever do such a thing, but in the face of persistent grilling and hysterical pleading, he grudgingly estimated that it would take at least two weeks. The mistress might be rich, but she drove a hard bargain and would need at-least a fortnight to haggle down the fee of any gunmen who responded to her advertisements.
“You take dis for a joke, Mannish Chaudhuri!” Precious shrieked. “It is not a joke! It was an accident!”
“Precious, it was a godsend. I beg you not to leave!”
But Precious would not stay. She would not be reasoned with. And she would not be mollified by schemes to dupe the mistress about what had really happened, by farfetched explanations Mannish was cooking up to explain the death of the dog. He was never specific with her when she demanded to know what earthly explanation of the dog’s death he was so sure would satisfy the mistress, but he kept insisting, “Precious, it will be all right. Leave the mistress to me.”
“I don’t want my bullet-riddled carcass displayed on de 6-o’clock news and used to sell toilet paper,” she ranted.
“Your carcass will not be displayed, Precious. This hatred of publicity is affecting your rationality.”
She crammed all her earthly belongings into the two battered suitcases she had brought with her from Jamaica and took a quick bath so she would at least return to her homeland smelling fresh and clean. Then she phoned Shirley to explain what had happened.
Shirley also implored her not to bolt to Jamaica, saying that she could come back to her house in Miami and stay there with no fear whatsoever of local gunman.
“Mummy,” she pleaded, “profit from your experience. Dis could be de start of a whole new career for you!”
How could a decent woman profit from fending off the unwanted attentions of an animal? What kind of career was she talking about? Precious demanded.
Shirley babbled desperately: It was about time someone came forward and boldly told the truth about horny Rover and Fido. How many millions of American women were at this moment silently suffering the heartbreak of domestic dog rape? Precious could become a nationally recognized lecturer on DRS, dog rape syndrome. She might sell her story to a tabloid. Who could say where such publicity could lead? Appearances on talk shows? A made-for-television movie?
Precious interrupted wearily.
“Kiss de children for me. I make up my mind. I will write you. I’m leaving before Mistress Lucy come back and find her dog dead.”
Mannish waved frenziedly at her when he heard her say this and piped from across the room, “The dog will not be dead here when the mistress returns! I want him as a souvenir.”
Precious hung up and angrily confronted the chauffeur. “I-did not kill dat dog so dat you can turn him into a souvenir! How much more bizarre and mad can de world turn all of a sudden?”
“I’m sorry, Precious. If you want to take the dog, of course, you are entitled to him.”
“I don’t want de dog! De dog is dead! Nobody in dis country understands me! Least of all you!”
“Then if you don’t want him, why cannot I have him?”
“For what? To eat?”
“I will give him to my cousin to freeze-dry.”
Precious shrugged an ignominious surrender, for it was plainly no use. She couldn’t cope. Nothing made any sense anymore. In her mind, the world had torn loose from its mooring and wobbled in inky space beyond prophecy. There was no path, no light, no edging darkness to guide the foot of the uncertain pilgrim. She muttered that he could do what he wanted, so long as he took her to the airport, and with this pronouncement she collapsed into a chair.
He helped her lug the suitcases into the trunk of the Rolls Royce, and just before they left, he wrapped the late would-be rapist in a carpet and stuffed him in the trunk.
“You pack dat animal next to me luggage?” Precious carped.
“He is securely wrapped. He is not touching your luggage.”
Nevertheless, as they departed for the airport she still grumbled that there would be trouble if she found dog corpse rubbing up against her two grips.
On their way to the airport they stopped at the freeze-drying establishment of the cousin, a laughing relative much like an uncle from Precious’s youth who took the whole world as a big joke. The cousin cackled with laughter when they entered, and gave off much the same cackle when Mannish unwrapped the dog from the carpet and asked that he be mummified in the freeze-drying chamber.
“How did the dog die?” wondered the cousin, filling out an official-looking form. With Precious grimly present, Mannish delicately said that it was a long story, and this cryptic utterance caused another stringy cackle to wriggle out of the cousin’s mouth.
They were standing in a whitewashed room that looked as if its walls had been repeatedly hand-scrubbed. The air smelled acridly of antiseptic like a hospital’s toilet. Before them was a metallic door posted with a sign that said,
Do Not Enter.
Crouched at the entrance to the dingy room, which served both as the cousin’s reception area and personal office, was a dog coiled to spring friskily up at visitors. Precious had shied away from him when she first timidly followed Mannish into the room, but the cousin assured her that it was only a display to show off the results of the freeze-drying chamber, which was vastly superior to taxidermy. He was very proud of his machine, purred the laughing cousin, inviting Precious to stroke the dog’s head and see if she could tell death with her touch. Precious shuddered and declined.
“I am now very curious,” pressed the cousin. “How did this animal die?”
This was to be her punishment, her burden, her personal cross; Precious made up her mind that she would shoulder it uncomplainingly and not put aside the bitter cup.
“He tried to rape me,” she said with statuesque dignity. “I-threw him off. He hit his head. It was an accident.”
The cousin exploded in a burst of laughter and spittle.
The American continent was slipping past the Rolls Royce as they continued their drive to the airport, with Precious gazing wistfully out the window. She was feeling bitterness and spite toward everything American, and if she had had a flag and a match, she would definitely have started a constitutional fire.
“Precious,” Mannish softly interrupted her reverie, “would you like to stop here for breakfast?”
She nodded sullen assent. The Rolls Royce, substantial and smooth as a rolling house, purred into the driveway of a McDonald’s and pulled up incongruously next to a battered pickup truck plastered over with bumper-sticker American flags.
“I wonder what dis patriot would have to say about what dat American dog try to do to me?” Precious asked bitterly as they stepped out of the Rolls.
“I would not ask questions of American patriots, Precious,” Mannish advised softly, holding the car door open for her. “Their abstractness of thought makes them dangerous. They are likely to shoot at querulous immigrants.”
They had a glum breakfast. Precious picked at her food with no appetite and sighed frequently as she glanced around the crowded dining room.
“Now I know how a man feels when he is wrongly hanged,” she muttered.
Mannish shook his head sympathetically and chewed with feeling on his sausage biscuit. He had never been hanged in his earlier lives, he declared, although once he came so close that the noose was around his neck before the unfortunate mistake was discovered.
“Up to last night,” Precious muttered, “I felt like the world was sane.”
“The feeling will return shortly, Precious. I am confident.”
“I hope you right. I’m only forty-eight. Living in a world I-thought was mad could drive me mad.”
They finished breakfast on this uneasy note and headed for the car.
Bustling through the front door as they exited the restaurant was a brisk young woman clad in the rind of a snugly tailored business suit. Mannish held open the door for her with a deferential smile.
“You don’t have to hold a door open for me,” she snapped. “I-have a hand of my own. After you.”
Mannish was in the parking lot when he staggered, whirled, and gaped after the woman. “It’s Beulah!” he gasped.
“It is not!”
“Precious! It is her! Oh, if she ever heard such grammar. I-mean, it is she. Wait here!”
“Come back here at once!” yelped Precious, but the chauffeur had already darted back into the restaurant and disappeared.
Precious stood melting in the warming sun before she made a moan of despair and went back inside to search for the chauffeur. She spotted him standing beside a table in a corner engaged in earnest conversation with the woman, who was staring at him suspiciously.
Precious tramped over and parked her bulk conspicuously near his elbow.
“Before I call the police on your friend,” the woman asked her crossly, “tell me, how did he know that my name is Beulah?”
Precious ended up taking a cab to the airport and boarding the plane with not even a life insurance salesman to wave her goodbye. She sat at a window seat and as the aircraft began to rumble down the runway, she silently begged it to crash. It did not comply but lifted off and roared into the heavens, retracting its wheels with a bone-jarring crunch that trickled through the flooring.
She glanced around the crowded aircraft, took in the usual motley collection of women and children, and withdrew her wish for a crash as selfish. But then she remembered reading about a woman in an airplane whose window had exploded, sucking her and her alone out into the sky to splatter 35,000 feet below on a farmer’s soybean field, and she asked for this to be her fate. She was right by the window and could be siphoned out without taking any unwilling passengers along. But the aircraft held intact; the window refused to shatter, and the flight was depressingly boring.
Over Cuba a nervous higgler sitting beside her mumbled that she always had nightmares about crashing on Cuban soil and being forced to learn Spanish, a foreign tongue she detested. Precious assured her that she had nothing to fear, for this was an unreliable, headstrong world that did exactly what it wanted to do for its own petty pleasure. It was very much like this airline, she added, which if it ever crashed you could be sure would crash only when it pleased. The higgler looked uneasy and mumbled that she had never heard anyone talk-about the world or an airline in such a way but that it was-true,-the world was really devilishly perverse. Then remembering that she was not on the earth but perched 35,000 feet above it, the higgler lapsed into a nervous and morose silence during which she fidgeted with the airsickness bag and flicked apprehensive glances around the cabin.
Beside her sat Precious with her eyes closed, intermittently requesting a crash, a sucking-out of the window, and assorted other calamities—she would even have settled for a heart attack—but as per usual life merrily bubbled inside her and the plane landed with a willful, provoking smoothness.
When Harold shook himself loose from the swirling crowd and elbowed a path across the pavement to greet her outside the airport, Precious had one flat answer to give to his babbling questions about why she had so abruptly returned from America: “Harold, I am a changed woman.”
Precious was a changed woman. She had no fear. She knew no anxiety. She suffered no dread. She did not know why she felt as she did, but she was a woman definitely changed enough to be styled eccentric or, at best, new. Harold chose to say “new” because Precious was his mother and he couldn’t bear to think that the belly out of which he had squirted onto this earth had grown eccentric. Mildred chose to say “eccentric,” arming herself with that damning wifely comment, “You mad just like you mother!” for use in future marital spats.
Precious was so new that she stayed with Harold for only two nights before she began clamoring to go back to her house in the mountains. Harold protested that she could not stay up there all alone, but Precious insisted that that was just what she wanted to do, and she was backed quickly by Mildred, who argued that a woman could do exactly what she wanted to do, this being modern Jamaica and not your slavery days, and if a mother-in-law wanted to move out of her adult son’s house where she was always welcome but definitely didn’t belong, she was entitled to do so without opposition.
Harold gave in with a tired sigh.
The next day he drove Precious back to her house in the mountains where he insisted on staying with her that first night, but Precious showed him the shotgun in the closet and the two-big dogs, one of which lunged at his ankle, and sweetly reminded him that she was the said woman who had once wiped his batty.
“Look at dis place, Mummy,” Harold pleaded, his hand brushing at the crumpled mountains like a disgruntled storekeeper gesturing at unsold goods.
“Kiss me,” Precious ordered, presenting a chubby cheek. “Then go home to you wife and family.”