Dogfight (20 page)

When the policeman in charge of the fire scene had finished questioning me—Had I seen anything suspicious? No. Did I know Mrs. Cunningham to be unhappy? I did not—I called Charlotte. She had stayed home to study for the test I was giving the next day. I teach history at the little college in town. Charlotte was what the college calls a “continuing education” student, so she was in my class though she was four years my senior, a fact that did not exempt our relationship from the college's strict noninvolvement policy. She skipped college the first time around to try her hand at acting in Los Angeles but told me that all she did out West was hone her waitressing skills.

She was sleeping when I called but came out anyway, and we stood at my window, watching sirens flashing silently, men with smudged faces moving through the pinkish light in wet raincoats. Mrs. Cunningham's house was built in 1827 in the Tuscan style, a stucco Italian villa dropped into the middle of Alabama, complete with terra-cotta shingles on the roof and marble floors. That house and the 650 acres that surrounded it were the reasons I moved out there. I would have slept in a tool shed to live in its shadow. Burned now, blackened and crumbling in places, it looked like something from the ruins of ancient Rome.

“She was in the house?” Charlotte whispered, tapping the window-pane. We couldn't stop ourselves from whispering. She had come in a
hurry and her hair was still mussed from sleeping and the pillow had drawn graceful lines on her face. I gave her a solemn nod.

Mrs. Cunningham had lived alone in the big house, the sole occupant of its thirty-two rooms, and didn't get out much, except to tend the garden. It was impossible to imagine Mrs. Cunningham as a young woman. My clearest memory was of her in the garden wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep off the sun and long baby blue formal gloves, the sort women used to wear to balls. To protect her skin, she said. Despite her age, her hair was still faintly red and the hat pushed brittle rings of it down around her face. Occasionally, she asked me to come over to the main house and help her move a piece of furniture or lift a heavy box down from the attic. Mrs. Cunningham believed that, because I taught at the college, I must therefore be an intellectual, so when I was finished with her heavy work, she would have a question ready for me, along with a glass of iced tea. How close did we—she said we, as if she were there—really come to securing foreign intervention in the Civil War? How did I think history would view George Wallace? Her tone was always serious so I told her whatever I knew on the subject, sometimes shamefully little. We never talked about ourselves.

Around her, Shiloh was a different dog, docile but alert, curling at her feet beneath the kitchen table, growling if he thought I got too close. I think Mrs. Cunningham liked having a man on the property, but I may be flattering myself. My visits were infrequent. We rarely saw each other, though we lived not a hundred yards apart.

My cottage was situated in a grove of maples, and Charlotte and I would scare ourselves at night by pretending that the wind was slave voices singing old spirituals. We would sit under the dark trees and convince ourselves that we could almost make out the words. Neither of us believed in ghosts, so we weren't really afraid, just thrilled, like children telling stories, and we would go rushing back inside and build a fire in the huge stone hearth and heap blankets on top of the bed. The fear, even make-believe, added something to
our lovemaking. My cottage was really just one big room with a shotgun kitchen and a sleeping loft beneath a cathedral ceiling, that drew the dancing, ghostly shadows away from us, leaving the rest of the room in warm brown light, like the light from a dream. We would stay that way, breathless and delightfully alone, the covers thrown aside now, the sheets sticking to our backs, until we heard Mrs. Cunningham calling Shiloh in for the night, her voice rising and falling, holding on the “shy” a few beats, then dropping off on “low.” She would call maybe a dozen times, and we would hear her door close, and the house lights would begin to go off, one by one, leaving the yard in darkness.

The night of the fire, we watched the firemen collecting their gear, rolling thick black hoses, sheathing extension ladders. When the last of the trucks had gone blinking sadly down the driveway, Charlotte said, “I think I wanna see it. Let's examine the wreckage.” She was already heading for the door.

“That's not a good idea,” I said.

“Why not?” she said. “Why are we whispering?”

I didn't have an answer for her right then, so I caught her by the belt and hauled her into my arms, hoping that maybe I could get her into my bed and keep her away from Mrs. Cunningham's house. She took an imaginary pen and paper in her hands and read along as she wrote, “Dear Mr. College President, one of your professors, a certain Parson Price, has been making sexual advances toward me and I'm beginning to feel an uncomfortable pressure in class.” She twisted free of my embrace and was out the door, marching across the lawn toward the house before I could stop her. There was no stopping Charlotte once she set her mind.

I jogged after her. We climbed through a section of collapsed wall and moved through the rooms downstairs, through burned-out doorways like cave mouths. Water was puddled on the floor. Somber smears of smoke streaked the walls. The fire started on the second floor, according to the fireman who woke me, and Mrs. Cunningham died in bed. We didn't go upstairs. Portions of the house were
strangely undamaged, small surviving corners, where a lamp stood untouched, as if Mrs. Cunningham had just stepped out and might at any minute return and require a little light for reading. Being in the house felt wrong, like trespassing on something sacred.

Shiloh was around there somewhere. He didn't try to prevent us from entering, wouldn't even come near us, as if he understood that something dire had happened. Every now and then, we would see him slip past a doorway, wraithlike. It amazed me that something that big could move so silently.

“It's beautiful,” Charlotte said. “In an awful way. It's more beautiful now than it was before, I think. It's less perfect, you know what I mean? It's like looking at someone's X-ray.”

She stopped to examine a rosewood dining table, running her fingers along its dusty surface. Faint blue moonlight slanted in through window frames—the heat had caused the glass to explode outward—and through holes in the ceiling, where the second floor had burned. The light caught in the clean streaks left on the table by Charlotte's fingers.

“Someone died here tonight, Charlotte,” I said. “We shouldn't be here.”

“She
lived
here, too, Parson, for a long time. That's what's so amazing. Think of everything that happened here before you came along.” Charlotte pressed her palm flat against the dining room wall. “Put your hand here,” she said. “It's still warm.”

“One of the guys from the fire department told me they think she started the fire herself. On purpose,” I said.

Charlotte jerked her hand away from the wall.

“She wanted to kill herself?”

I told her what the fireman had told me. That the bedroom door was closed and locked but all the doors downstairs were open to whatever sort of intruder might want to help himself. The theory was that she wanted to bar Shiloh from the bedroom and be certain he had a way out of the fire. While I was talking, I watched Charlotte for a reaction. She walked over to the window, her steps crunching on the
cooled embers that had rained down from upstairs. She stood there, perfectly still, and looked out at the night. A breeze moved past her and I could smell her perfume mixed in with the scent of ash. The moonlight was gauzy on her cheeks.

“You told me they had to carry Shiloh out of the fire,” she said, turning toward me, her face now shadowed.

“Maybe he's too stupid to know that fire is a bad thing,” I said.

“Maybe he didn't want to leave her.” She faced the window again and cocked her head as if listening intently. I tried to hear what she was hearing. Cicadas ringing in the darkness. A train rumbling along the tracks that divided Mrs. Cunningham's property, just barely shaking the ground. Nothing much but those strange country sounds that only make you more aware of the silence behind them. Charlotte said, “That's the saddest thing I ever heard,” and I didn't know whether she meant the plaintive night sounds or what I had just finished telling her.

I was a quiet tenant and, until Charlotte, had never brought a woman to the farm, so most of the complaints between Mrs. Cunningham and me tended to be mine, regarding Shiloh. I drink too much and would occasionally wander the fields at night. I don't know if Mrs. Cunningham was ever aware of my roving, though I have heard that old people tend to be light sleepers. She anyways never mentioned it, and I had lived on her farm for two years before she died. I would wander down to the railroad tracks or to watch the bats swarming over the pond, skimming for insects that lit on the surface. You could throw a stone out over the water and the bats would dive-bomb it, kamikaze runs, plunging themselves into the pond, blind by nature, stupid from hunger, after what they thought was food. It was a mistake, the first time I fooled the bats. I was just skipping rocks. The second stone was a test case to make sure the first wasn't a fluke or a figment of my imagination. After that, I tell myself that I was drunk, that I wouldn't have gone on tricking the bats with stones, if I had been sober. But I remember the buzz of
power that came with killing without laying a hand, that came at the moment of impact, when a bat flashed through the night haze and smacked the surface, a sound like surprise, and didn't come up.

When we first started seeing each other, Charlotte asked me to tell her the worst thing I had ever done. She wanted to know how low I could go. She wanted to prepare herself for the worst. I thought about it for a while, then took her down to the pond and told her about the bats. She didn't say anything for a long moment, just looked at me, considering. I shifted awkwardly in her gaze, worried that telling her had been a mistake, that I had let her look into my thoughts and she had seen something too awful to stay. The bats slapped the air above us with their wings. Charlotte turned away from me to watch them. Her hands were in the pockets of her jeans and the wind was blowing, making her cheeks red, whipping her hair around her face, causing strands of it to stick to her lips. Softly, she said, “They're just bats.” Then, turning back to me, smiling a little, gathering momentum, “They're blood suckers. Wait till deer season and look around for the blaze orange caps. Those are the nut jobs. Don't turn your back on those fuckers.” I didn't know if she meant what she said, but I had never been more grateful.

There had been other women in my life during my time at Mrs. Cunningham's farm but only short-term, a weekend or two, and none of them had been invited to visit. The cottage was mine alone before Charlotte came along. She told me that she had been by herself a while, too, hadn't really felt at home with a man, until she stayed at my house. I can't speak for Charlotte, but I should say that I have always had trouble getting involved. In anything. I tried newspaper reporting after graduate school but couldn't get over the feeling that my work, even when writing the most innocent of stories, birth or wedding announcements, was an invasion of privacy. I wasn't long with the newspaper. I returned to history, for which I was originally trained. The stories of history had already been written.

The first night Charlotte spent with me was an accident of sorts. I had asked my students out to the farm for a get-acquainted picnic.
Both of us were drunk, inspired, I think, by the rest of the students, most of whom were underage. Charlotte stayed late to help me clean. Just before we went to bed, she said to me, “You think too much. You're educated to within an inch of your life, aren't you?”

Maybe so. Charlotte believed I was laughably careful about hiding our relationship from the administration. I passed her in the hall without speaking, called her by her last name in class. Probably, she was right, nothing would have happened if we were discovered. But I hated the “probably,” hated its lack of guarantee. So she smiled indulgently to ease my apprehensions and promised again that she had told no one, that she would not ever tell.

We had the farm to ourselves for almost a month after the fire. Charlotte came out on the nights when she didn't draw the late shift at the Italian restaurant where she worked. Shiloh still frightened Charlotte, but she had softened toward him since hearing of his loyalty to Mrs. Cunningham. We took to leaving bowls of food for him, raw eggs cracked over white bread, leftover grits, on what used to be the patio of the main house. Charlotte believed we could win him over. I told her that I had tried bribing him before without success, but she thought that maybe Mrs. Cunningham's death had changed the dynamic between us.

Shiloh's enthusiasm for harassing me was beginning to flag and we felt sorry for him. At Charlotte's request, I made myself an easy target. We thought it might cheer him up. I would walk slowly around the main house, wear a groove back and forth to my car, but he didn't take advantage of my vulnerability. My path took me down to the pond, where a family of geese would scatter at my approach, and the stillness of the water was broken occasionally by a jumping bass. I even stood too close to the edge with my back to Shiloh, which I thought would be irresistible. He would keep me in sight but never come close, breeze through the high grass on my flank or stretch out on the hilltop above the pond, looking down on me, scrunch-eyed and serious like I was an algebra problem to be solved. I have to admit that there was something lovely about the way he moved, something
elemental, long and low to the ground. Once, when I had lost hope of an attack, he hit me hard from behind. I sprawled on the grass trying to catch my breath, and he curled up a few yards away. I had the feeling that he knocked me down for old times' sake.