Dogfight (21 page)

When the sun was almost all the way gone, Charlotte and I would drag my rocking chairs with the cane bottoms out onto the grass beneath the maples. It was warm for that early in the spring, but it was cooler on the lawn than it was in my cottage. We played at being rich on Mrs. Cunningham's farm. It was easy with the main house so close, even a charred shell of it, easier now that Mrs. Cunningham was gone. We could be her secret heirs. We debated putting in a swimming pool.

“It'll be a godsend in summer,” Charlotte said. “We could put it right here under the trees and the branches would catch the pool lights at night.”

“But, Charlotte, this isn't Las Vegas,” I said. “A pool just wouldn't sit right.”

We sat quietly a moment, considering the options. Charlotte said, “We'll never come to an agreement, my love. Ask Montague to break the tie.” Montague was our imaginary butler. We laughed at our silliness. We called each other “my love” and felt very English and, when Charlotte asked for another glass of Dom Perignon, I knew that she was referring to our bottle of grocery store wine. It seemed those nights, my thoughts pretty with wine, that everything, the house, the pond, the grand evening shadows that lingered on the lawn, that all of this belonged to me.

Mornings, before my afternoons courting Shiloh and evenings with Charlotte, belonged, however, to the college. Each spring, the college cooked up some historical anniversary and served it to the students in a section called “Topical History,” taught by the low man on the tenure ladder and monitored closely by the promotion committee. The class that fell to me was the fiftieth anniversary of both VE and VJ day. I told my students about the U.S.S.
Indianapolis,
the cruiser that delivered the atomic bombs to Okinawa so that they
could be dropped more conveniently elsewhere in Japan. On its return voyage, the
Indianapolis
was torpedoed and its crew set adrift on life rafts.

The class was interested that day, a detail I hoped wasn't lost on the committee observer. They are always interested when the subject is sex or death. I told them that the crew watched 80 percent of their shipmates be devoured by sharks, that many of them committed suicide, shot themselves, or gave themselves up to drowning, slipping their life jackets over their heads and letting the weight of their clothes drag them under. It was in their power to kill themselves. The sharks were beyond their control. One of the young men in class, a punk kid who always wore a black leather jacket embroidered with delicate chains and had f-u-c-k tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand and t-h-i-s on his right, and who was not at all impressed with me, asked, “What are we supposed to understand from that story?” This kid didn't like the grades I'd been giving him and had a knack for flustering me.

That night, Charlotte and I walked down to the pond and she said, “Every action has a consequence, my love.”

The bats darted above us, their motion spastic and somehow too quick. I wouldn't have tricked them, but I looked for stones anyway. I liked the cold feel of them in my palm.

“That's what you should have told that student today,” she said. “That's what he should have understood from the story of the
Indianapolis”

“That's a rather occult revisionist take,” I said. “I'm not qualified to teach karmic retribution. You might try Eastern Religions.”

I played the moment over in my head, the question, my embarrassed stuttering and note shuffling, like I had the answer written down right there if I could only find it, the committee observer watching all of this. What I came up with in class, after considerable flailing, was, “There's nothing to understand
per se.
It's just a story. Something interesting and terrible that happened once. Something that bears remembering.”

* * *

We had several visitors to the farm after the fire. An insurance agent taking Polaroids, then an artist who wanted to paint the ruined house. Shiloh greeted each visitor ferociously, chasing them back to their cars and pressing his muzzle to the window, foaming on the glass. I would leave whatever I was doing and cross the lawn from my cottage, a toothless dog, to inspect the stranger, to bestow or withhold my approval like the lord of the manor. One evening, about a month after Mrs. Cunningham's death, we heard Shiloh barking, then a woman's voice dismissing him, “Quiet, dog. Lay one paw on me and you're history,” and before I could leave my chair to reconnoiter, she rapped once on the door and let herself in without waiting for an invitation. “You're Parson Banks,” she said. “I'm Brady Cunningham. Your landlady's daughter.”

I hadn't even realized that Mrs. Cunningham had children. I had imagined for her a spinster's existence with maybe a lover lost at sea or leaving her at the altar. But here was this woman, small and wiry like Mrs. Cunningham, with Mrs. Cunningham's red hair, standing in my cottage, one hand still loosely on the doorknob, claiming to be her child and informing me that they were putting the property on the market. “Don't get up. I just thought you should know,” she said. “As eldest daughter, I'm serving as executrix for the estate. I've got a sister who isn't altogether happy with me in charge, but the one thing we can agree on is to get rid of this old place. It's a financial sinkhole.”

Two children, daughters. Charlotte was in the kitchen cracking raw eggs into a bowl for Shiloh, when Brady came in, and she stayed there, silent, her hands poised over the bowl, fingers dripping yolk. This daughter was all business, telling me that the cottage was still mine, until they found a buyer. I would pay my rent to an estate account. She wasn't interested in my sympathy. When I said, “I'm sorry for your loss,” she said, “Don't be. I haven't spoken to that woman in almost ten years. Mother was the meanest woman I ever knew.”

She stepped backward out of the house, closed the door behind
her, opened it again, and leaned inside. She said, “Oh, and if you see my sister around here trying to take anything out of the house, call the police. She looks like me only blonder and taller.” Before I could tell her that I didn't want to get involved, didn't want to be in the middle of an inheritance dispute, she was gone, the door shut firmly between us. I heard Shiloh barking again, then her car heading off, tires crunching on the gravel driveway. I hadn't left my chair. Wind rustled in the chimney. I turned to face Charlotte and raised my eyebrows in a question. She said, “Don't ask me what that was all about. Who does she think she is barging in here? You tell me that. Her mother's dead a month before she decides to show her face. And then only to sell the house. Her mother's house, Parson.” We looked at each other a moment longer before Charlotte went back to cracking eggs.

Brady Cunningham didn't bother to do anything about Shiloh. A For Sale sign appeared at the end of the driveway a few days after she left, but I pulled it out of the ground and tossed it into the rain gully beside the road so it would look like it had been knocked over accidentally. A realtor began stopping by to show the house. Because of the fire, it was a bargain basement deal. Most of the potential buyers were nice enough, assuring me that if they decided to purchase the place I would be able to stay on as a tenant. They were wealthy people from out of state, looking for a lifestyle change. I hated that word, lifestyle. There was an oilman from Texas, a computer genius, close to my age but worth about a million times as much, even a movie actress whose stardom was beginning to fade. Each of them asked me how I liked living on Mrs. Cunningham's farm. I didn't tell them that I would buy it in an instant, if that were within my means. When the realtor wasn't listening, I would invent reasons for them not to buy and offer them grudgingly as if I were just giving a little friendly advice. A fictitious article I had read about how expensive and ultimately impossible it was to restore fire-damaged houses to their original condition. The biblical swarms of biting insects that descended on the house at dusk or the plague of rats that infested
the basement in winter. I found that the most effective technique was simply to rehash the details of Mrs. Cunningham's suicide. Often the realtor hadn't apprised them and I found that telling the story that way, adding my own specifics—Mrs. Cunningham soaking the bed and carpet in gasoline, before crawling under the covers with a match—her suicide began to seem like just another invention to prevent the house from being sold.

Brady Cunningham began coming out to the farm more often once the house was on the market. We'd see her from my porch in her bib overalls and work gloves, her hair tied back with a bandanna, Aunt Jemima-style. She would emerge from the house sooty and disheveled, carrying a cardboard box of salvageable goods. Every now and then, she gave us a smile or a tentative wave, which we vehemently ignored. Charlotte had an idea that Brady was somehow connected to her mother's death or, at least, that she knew something that she wasn't telling, and that in the boxes that she took away was the evidence. When she was gone, we would slip into the house and try to discern what was missing, but neither of us was familiar enough with the place to recognize an absence. We found gaps in the charred bookcase but couldn't remember what, if anything, had been there before. End tables with blank surfaces, empty drawers in which we could not find a clue. The only thing missing, that we could tell, was Mrs. Cunningham.

Shiloh stayed clear when Brady was around. Charlotte wondered why he didn't attack, why he didn't drive her screaming from the grounds. She worried that Brady Cunningham's appearance had somehow robbed him of his spirit. I said, “He's a dog, Charlotte. What you're saying implies that he understands what's happening around here.” But I worried, too. Sometimes, when we went down to the main house to collect the bowls that we had left for him, we discovered the food eaten, sometimes not. I worried that Shiloh wasn't getting any of it, that a raccoon or something was reaping the rewards of my generosity. I decided to become a spy.

I set the food in plain sight and climbed the stairs to find a hiding
place with a good vantage of the patio. The staircase had at one time been a wonderful thing, with a thick, smooth banister that curved down from the second floor like a graceful slide, but now its surface was charred rough and I was afraid to put weight against it for fear that it might collapse. I stepped gingerly in the darkness. Upstairs, in the hallway beside the master bedroom, I found a narrow break in the wall, where a section of mortar had come loose, thin like in a gunner's turret, that let through a rectangle of light. The moon was almost full and I could see, from my hiding place, the dark shape of the house spreading gently on the lawn, not moving when the breeze pushed through the high, uncut grass.

I watched the plate of food for hours, but nothing came to eat it. Most of the wall between my hiding place and the bedroom had burned away, and I could see the moonlight playing in there, too, casting strange shadows. Something caught my attention, a rustle, motion glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. I wasn't alone in the house. I held my breath and listened. Nothing. No sound but the night humming. I felt a presence though, like knowing someone is behind a tinted window, even though they can't be seen.

I whispered, “Shiloh, that you? You don't scare me, you punk dog. I wipe my ass on punks like you.” Of course, there was no answer. I was spooking myself. I had to resist the temptation to look in Mrs. Cunningham's bedroom to make certain her body was gone. I had seen her bedroom once before the fire. She had asked me to carry a box of linens upstairs for her and I sat it down on the very bed in which she died. Arched windows paneled one wall and they were full of sunlight, which drifted inside and electrified motes of dust. Mrs. Cunningham came into the room behind me, carrying a smaller, lighter box, and I took it from her and held it while she caught her breath. She rested one hand softly on my arm, the other on her chest, and smiled apologetically. The meanest woman I ever knew, her daughter had said, but I couldn't see it. Mrs. Cunningham was already an old woman when I met her, so it was difficult, there in the cindery darkness of her house, to imagine her with enough passion
in her to do something that would drive her daughters away, enough despair to choose this particular way of dying. I imagined I could smell gas very faintly when the breeze moved through the walls.

Charlotte insisted we start riding home from the college together. She said it was high time we stopped pretending. Time to take charge. “We'll do it on a Friday,” she said. “Kick start the weekend.” My heart pounded until we were well past the front gate, as if I were carrying drugs or the body of a murdered colleague in the trunk. Friday night, we grilled steaks under the waning moon and when we heard dogs barking in the distance, we joined them. We crouched on the ground and howled until our throats were sore. We made love in the high grass. The grass hadn't been cut since the fire and was full of spring wildflowers.

Later, Charlotte and I lay in bed naked, while I read over my lesson plan and Charlotte did her homework. The sheet was pulled up to our waists, so her chest was uncovered and I was having a little trouble concentrating. Charlotte looked up from her book and said, “If I die tomorrow—say I'm hit by a bus—how would you commit suicide?”

“Don't be morbid,” I said.

“I would probably slit my wrists in the bathtub,” she said. “Not over you, understand. I wouldn't be as devastated by your death as you would by mine.” Here, she smiled and gave my hand a squeeze. “But if I had to commit suicide, razor blades and warm water would be the way to go.”

“I'd eat a bullet,” I said. “Quick and painless.”

“Doesn't make for a handsome corpse though, does it?” Charlotte made a gun with her hand, put the index finger barrel between her lips, pulled the trigger, and collapsed dead with her head on my chest, her hair tickling my neck. She put her hand on my stomach and circled my belly button with her damp fingertip.