Dogfight (22 page)

“What about hanging?” I pointed at the rafters. “Throw a rope up there and jump from the loft.”

“Very romantic,” she said. “But far more agonizing than a garden hose from the exhaust pipe.”

“I've got it,” I said. “Sleeping pills and booze.”

She didn't answer. She drew in a breath and held it. Everything was quiet. The startled silence that follows a gunshot. I could feel her going still, softening against me, letting all the energy slip out of her muscles. I put my hand on her back. The only sign of life I could feel in her was her heartbeat, quickening each second she refused to breathe. I counted a hundred beats before she threw the covers back, exhaling, and put her feet on the floor, her back to me, the way a drunk steadies himself when the room spins. She lifted her hair away from the back of her neck. The underside of her hair was damp with sweat.

“What could have possibly made her want to die like that?” she said.

I scooted over on the bed and blew softly on her shoulders to cool her.

“She must have done something unspeakable,” she said.

“I try not to think about it,” I said.

“You must have thought about it.”

Charlotte and I had been carpooling from campus for about a week, leaving the old brick buildings together and crossing the busy quadrangle to the parking lot, my worry easing gradually from me with each uneventful trip, when I received an anonymous message on my answering machine. “I know about your little secret,” the voice said, “I know all about the teacher's pet.” My skin inched along my bones. The voice was disguised, baritone, as if the speaker was young and imitating a grown man, but I would have sworn it was the kid with the leather jacket and tattoos. I played the message over for Charlotte a few times to confirm my suspicions about the identity of the speaker. She said, “Screw that little shit. You let me worry about him.”

I discovered her by accident, a few days later, standing over him in the men's bathroom near my office. She must have tracked him to the spot, waited until she knew he would be alone. He was cowering in a corner and she had the collar of his jacket in one hand and a can
of mace in the other. The kid was wearing some sort of kilt that day and black long underwear bottoms with his jacket and Doc Martens. He had his hands in front of his face, begging her not to spray him, and looked absolutely terrified. Neither of them heard me come in, and I slipped back into the hall and let the door swing quietly shut. I didn't want her to know that it frightened me to see her like that, full of violence and potent with ire. It excited me some as well. I didn't want to have to tell her that, despite my anger, I didn't think that I could do what she had done. From the kid, we never heard another word on the subject. I eased up a little after that, when I was grading his papers.

The computer genius bought Mrs. Cunningham's house in April. He came down to close the deal and told me that it would be eight months or so before the restoration was complete. He was a nice enough guy, with wire-rimmed glasses that kept slipping down the bridge of his nose. We had a few drinks—for a computer guy he could put it away—and he offered me a renewed lease and I accepted, pretending that I was grateful and that I was happy for him.

“You should buy,” he said. “I don't want to sacrifice my tenant, but renting's a losing proposition. Land's the only real investment. Land and computers. This place is gold.” I wanted to hit him right then, to warn him off somehow, as Charlotte had my student. He raised his drink in a toast to land and computers and brought it to his lips and knocked the edge against his glasses, spilling a little, bumping the glasses crooked. He blinked and straightened his glasses on his nose. Probably he had been one of those kids I used to feel sorry for when I was a kid myself, but who was sorry for who now? Apparently, Shiloh had done his shepherding routine on my new landlord the day he signed the papers. I apologized and told him that the dog belonged to me. I assured him that it wouldn't happen again.

When the construction crews began arriving, along with hordes of people from the historical society who took it upon themselves to make certain the rebuilding fit the original model, I began to see Shiloh less. He became nocturnal. I still don't know if he ate the
food that I left out for him, and I hoped sometimes that he didn't, that he was feeding himself in the wild, not depending on anyone, gorging on rabbits and opossum that he hunted.

Charlotte and I would sit on the hill above the house, concealed by the high grass, and watch the construction crews at work, watch the men walk along the spine of the roof, like tightrope walkers, one foot on either side. When they had shut down the machinery and abandoned their equipment for the day, we would steal down to the site, furtive as Apaches, to inspect their progress. Where there had been charred plaster appeared new stud wall and reinforced support beams. They leveled ruined walls, chipped away damaged moldings, and brought in cement and sand and hydrated lime and laid new stucco over whatever masonry was salvageable. The stucco went on wet, glistened in the evening light. Charlotte leaned close to examine the faint, slightly discolored lines where the new walls met the old. She pressed the stucco with her thumb and it gave a little, allowed itself to be manipulated like putty, nearly hardened. She circled through the house, running her fingers along the walls, eyes narrow with apprehension, toeing piles of rubble and surveying the contents a little too closely, kneeling to examine the seams between blocks of new marble. I liked the way she looked with her hair pulled back, her eyes intent on her careful inspection.

Mounds of debris, ruined shingles and mortar, blackened pieces of the original frame, and chalky hunks of drywall, accumulated on the lawn and Charlotte couldn't stand the sight of them, so every once in a while, we hauled a load down to the railroad tracks to make a bonfire. A train would come rumbling by and the conductor would see our fire and blow his whistle. We stood close to the train to feel the wind in its wake, close enough that it became a passing blur, the lettering on the cars unreadable. We didn't say much. Most nights we were too tired to make love.

The fire made a genial orange circle in the clearing, sent up looping streams of sparks like fireflies. Shiloh would wander down to watch us and sit at the fringe of the light. Charlotte would whistle
and call his name, trying to get him to join us in the firelight. He'd whine and pace back and forth in the shadows, as if he wanted to come closer but something was holding him back.

Brady Cunningham returned on a Saturday. Charlotte was working the day shift at the restaurant, and I was alone. I was grading papers and heard voices outside and went to the window to see who was trespassing on my property. Two women, one of them Brady, stalked circles around each other in the gravel behind the house. They were wearing similar black dresses and heels, both of them reddish blond, looking almost identical from a distance, and it occurred to me that there might have been some sort of memorial service that day and I wasn't invited, which made me a little angry. They were too far away for me to make out all of what they were saying, but I could catch snatches of name calling, and it was easy enough to hear the anger in their voices. Their movement was jerky and tense, like marionettes, and it seemed from my vantage point as if this whole thing wasn't real, was being staged for my benefit.

Brady turned suddenly and looked at my window. Her shoulders relaxed and she pushed her fingers through her hair. It was a moment before I realized she was looking at me, watching me watch them. She waved, and I threw myself prone on the floor beneath the window. When I had gathered the courage to look again, she was crossing the lawn to my cottage, wobbling a little when her heels sunk into the ground. I flopped down again and belly-crawled to the front door to lock it and then to the bathroom to hide. I was certain she was going to drag me into the middle of their argument somehow. I sat in the shower with the curtain pulled. I didn't move, even when she pounded on the door and circled the house trying windows, shouting, “I know you're in there. You aren't fooling anybody.”

The longer I listened to her shouts and reproachful knocks, the more humiliated I became. I felt pathetic and weak, sitting there, damp from the shower floor, my arms circling my knees. She could outwait me. She knocked long enough that it became apparent that
she wasn't going to leave. Eventually, I went slinking to the door, a beaten dog, and let her inside.

“I was in the bathroom,” I said.

She waved my explanation away. Her eyes were red from crying, and she wanted to know if I had any gin. I watched her sister driving away in a humpbacked brown station wagon.

“I just wanted to take a last look at the place,” Brady said.

I went inside and fixed us glasses of gin and grapefruit juice and brought them back out onto the porch. We made small talk—she was living in New Mexico; I was originally from Louisiana. I prepared a dozen statements in my mind to rebuke her for the way she had treated her mother in death. But I didn't say anything.

“Are you married?” she said.

“No. You?”

“Not me. Mother was married three times,” she said, swirling her drink. She pressed her fingertips to her eyes. “Did you know that?”

“No.” I did not. It occurred to me, then, not for the first time, that there were other things I didn't know. I had no idea what had happened between Brady and her mother. But something
had
happened. I was sure of that. And, all of a sudden, I didn't want to know what it was. I was afraid that she was going to tell me. It took me eight drinks to get through her visit. She kept talking, telling stories about her mother—Mrs. Cunningham had worked on an ocean liner, when she was young, had been in charge of teaching the passengers to hula dance; I couldn't believe it—but she never did tell me why she left. She stayed on my front porch long enough for night to settle on us and bring the fireflies out. There must have been a thousand of them, winking and twisting, leaving faint impressions of themselves on the darkness. I could see them in the most distant fields, adding depth, making the land look as big as the sky.

Brady said, “When I was a girl, I used to try and catch them in Mason jars with holes punched in the lids. Right out there. I had this idea that I could light my room with their tails.”

“That's a nice memory,” I said.

“It's one of those things,” she said. “You don't even know you've forgotten it, until it's right there in front of you.”

It was dark enough that I couldn't see her face.

“Do you want me to turn a light on?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Please don't.”

I could tell that she was crying again.

The next day it rained and the construction crew didn't come. Charlotte arrived after work and we walked down to the driveway and sat in the cab of a hauling truck the crew had left behind. We watched the house through blooms of rain on the windshield. It felt like we were waiting for something. The keys were dangling from the ignition, so I gave them a half-turn to run the wipers and the radio. The only station we could get played country songs.

“Should we go in?” she said.

“I don't really feel like it,” I said.

She didn't answer. The rain came down in fits and starts, one minute hard enough that our view was completely obscured, the next so gently that the wipers whined across the windshield. We saw Shiloh come up over a hill behind the pond and stand there looking down on everything. His fur was matted to his body with rain, showing clearly the weight he had lost, and he looked wolfish and severe. He trotted to the water's edge, padded in a circle, then curled up, throwing his tail over his nose.

“I was wondering about a dog's memory,” Charlotte said. “I've heard it's out of sight out of mind for dogs. They forget their owners, if they're separated for more than a couple of weeks.”

“I think he remembers her,” I said.

“What does he remember about her?”

“Her voice, her smell,” I touched the keys, the rabbit's foot key chain. “He remembers the way she looked.”

“What else?”

“You name it,” I said. “He remembers everything.”

The rain was coming down hard again and it was difficult to pick
Shiloh out in the high grass. Charlotte covered my hand, the one that was jangling the keys, with hers. I thought I was bothering her, that she was going to ask me to stop, but she didn't. She just sat there, looking out, touching my fingers.

That evening—the quiet and the rain, Charlotte's hand on mine—had a dusty feeling, was colored with the hazy light of something that had already happened. I didn't know, then, that the end for the two of us was already beginning. A second ticked by, and another and on and on, relegated by their passing to history, joining the long stream of time that already included Mrs. Cunningham's death and would eventually, after just a few more months of marking time, encompass the day that Charlotte would return to California to give acting another shot. She would leave before the house was finished, gleaming and perfect, as though it had never caught fire. And she would leave before Shiloh disappeared. I would begin to see him less and less as the house neared completion, and then, one morning, I would wake and walk outside to stand beneath the trees, and he would be gone. But I, of course, didn't know any of this then, sitting there with Charlotte in the fading rain. As we watched, bats began to materialize in the air above the pond as if from nowhere. Shiloh's head snapped up at the sound of them, their chirping, their fluttering wings. I wondered if it was true that he remembered everything about Mrs. Cunningham, even what it was that made him love her. Shiloh got to his feet and snapped at the bats that flew too near. He charged into the shallow water after them and they cartwheeled above him, frenzied by his pursuit. Shiloh rose up on his hind legs, still snapping, reaching higher, swatting with his paws, and for an instant, with Shiloh standing precariously and the bats whirling above him, it was as if they were performing an ancient ritual dance, as old and as candid as time. That I would remember. Shiloh dancing with the bats in the leathery twilight. I would make it mine.