Funny Once (26 page)

Hugh had not taken Introductory Creative Writing, Prose, but neither had anyone else in the group. Ms. Fox had sighed upon discovering this, muttering about prerequisites and permission-of-instructor forms, taking down the name of the registrar who’d blithely signed them up. The U was flexible, Hugh might have been able to explain to her, and that was one of its virtues. Prerequisites were for nitwits.

“Why does this building smell like a hamster cage?” she asked, in the middle of calling roll. The class as a group sniffed the air.

“I don’t smell hamsters,” said one student.

“It’s a little like the zoo maybe,” said another, helpfully.

Hugh didn’t say so but thought it was probably because of the homeless man who lived in the building. He showed up in the evenings, while the doors were still unlocked to let out the students of the last classes, yet after the official staff had left the grounds. There’d been budget cuts recently, so that the janitors only cleaned once a week instead of every night. As a result, the homeless man usually had the place to himself, a series of bathrooms and classrooms and vending machines, even a telephone, a few couches, and some magazines, if he was interested. He hugged the wall when he entered, skulking by with his head lowered, the only real giveaway his plastic bags instead of a backpack. Otherwise, he could have been a student, scruffy, sullen, pensive. Hugh had only taken notice after a few semesters. He was always one for a good scam; he never pulled them but he enjoyed conceiving them, and witnessing this one. If he hadn’t been afraid of spooking the guy, he’d have asked his name and brought him a sandwich on class nights. In lieu of this, Hugh had planted a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread behind the third-floor couch last semester.

Ms. Fox had moved on to other issues concerning her new job. “Is it really named Hiney, this place?”

“Hiney,” the group agreed, nodding. The Hiney Building, for Ed Hiney, the man whose statue greeted you at the door, extending its bronze hand into which somebody was always placing unlikely items, condoms or a cigarette.

“Unbelievable.” She continued down her list of students, calling names and having those names amended (“Call me Babs,” said Barbara Kilcox; “I go by Nettie,” said Antoinette Myers). Again, Ms. Fox ran her hands under her hair and lifted it from her shoulders, heaving it over. If it annoyed her as much as she made it seem it did, why wouldn’t she simply cut it off?

Now she went around the circle, asking everyone to briefly (“
briefly
,” she emphasized) say who they were and why they were here. The other man in the class was younger than the usual demographic for continuing ed, and had hair almost as long as Ms. Fox’s. He had his hands in it as well, flipping it, as she had, over his shoulders. The rest were women, the assortment Hugh had grown comfortable with, wives and office professionals, dabblers, hobbyists, brainy high school girls, mostly kind, and for the most part very pleased to find Hugh in their midst. You did not have to do much to be the favorite man in a classroom of continuing ed women.

And among the college creative writing faculty Hugh was known as “Good Hugh.” There was a “Bad Hugh” whom Hugh had met at a poetry reading several months earlier. The faculty had tried to banish Bad Hugh from their classes, but the threat of litigation and a timid dean had prevailed.

“Hugh Panik?” Ms. Fox asked, eyebrows raised in what looked like dread. She didn’t pronounce the
H
in his name, yet she also did not pronounce his last name correctly.
You Paneek.
Sometimes the teachers knew only to beware a middle-aged Hugh. There’d been confusion concerning the Hughs until both had shown up at the end-of-­semester poetry reading in May. Bad Hugh was a retired professor from the college. He wasn’t quite old enough to have retired in the usual way. He’d been forced out by a series of strokes that had left him somewhat diminished and odd. Half of him appeared to have been short-circuited, fried like a faulty machine: one eye blinked like a Christmas tree light, and he held his left arm with his right while dragging his left leg behind him. The poetry he’d read that evening had been populated with biblical characters, and, like a child, Bad Hugh had seemed titillated by naughty words and bodily functions. He could hardly make it through “Flatulent Jesus” without bursting into guffaws. When the other students read, he blurted out random reactions, immediately slapping both hands over his mouth. “I’m a bad boy,” he murmured repeatedly. “Bad Hugh.”

“I’m not Bad Hugh,” Hugh assured Ms. Fox at break. For the last forty-five minutes she had been casting stern glances in his direction.

“‘Bad Hugh’?” she said.

“There’s another Hugh,” Hugh explained, understanding now that she hadn’t been warned by her colleagues in creative writing. This meant several things. One was that the other instructors didn’t like her. Another was that her stern glance had to do with so-called Good Hugh himself rather than an instance of mistaken identity. And, very unfortunately, he was only complicating matters by trying to explain Bad Hugh. Maybe now Hugh was going to become Ms. Fox’s own private Bad—and banned—Hugh.

A woman in class at just that moment stepped in to save him. Not on purpose. But nevertheless.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve locked my keys in my car.” She wasn’t a regular. She was new, more or less Hugh’s age, and looking very frazzled.

“Class isn’t over,” Ms. Fox said, lifting the wrist that sported a watch the size of an alarm clock.

“But my dog is in the car.”

“And . . . ?”

“It’s very stressful, having to think about my dog in the car, locked in, I mean. I wanted to get it taken care of so that I could relax and pay attention.” She would cry, Hugh saw; life with his sister Holly had taught him the signs, the reddening nose and cheeks, the fluttering eyelashes, the little storm just on the verge of breaking.

“I’ll help,” Hugh said. They left Ms. Fox giving them both her fierce eyebrows.

“Her thought balloon says, ‘Humph!’” Hugh told the woman as they trotted down the echoing steps of the Hiney Building.

“Do
you
think it’s cruel to leave a dog in the car?”

“Not necessarily.” She was pretty, although Hugh hadn’t really noticed her during class. He’d been preoccupied with how he’d rectify what he’d thought was a mistaken identity situation. He himself wasn’t particularly bothered by Bad Hugh. At the poetry reading last spring, Bad Hugh had applauded with genuine enthusiasm, wiping his eyes when Hugh had read his piece about his mother’s death, heckling—“Oh, hot mama, hot mama!”—in a very charitable and mostly sympathetic manner.

“Some people think it’s cruel,” she was saying. “Sometimes they give me grief. Isn’t it so weird how total strangers will walk up and tell you what they think? I really do not appreciate that.” Her dog had his nose at the back window, which had been left open an inch. The evening was less mild than the one two nights ago; a breeze tossed around the parking lot trash. On a night like this, it would have seemed sinister to convey a man to a nursing home in the back of a pickup truck. It would have looked like hazing, or Halloween. The clouds were hurrying overhead, the sky yellow-tinged, a situation that could lead to tornado.

The woman explained that she left the
back
windows cracked instead of the
front
so that if the dog wasn’t enough of a deterrent (he was big, black, extremely hairy and enthusiastic; the window was thick with foggy nose prints), a thief would have a harder time getting to the driver’s seat.

Why would it matter, Hugh thought idly, which door you came in through? But never mind. Now he had to help her break into her car. Her spare set of keys was the set locked inside (she’d lost the originals
ages
ago, down a sewer drain after a fender bender), dangling there in the ignition, an outrageously large bangle of objects that it seemed would be difficult to forget when exiting a vehicle. How, Hugh wondered, did she fit her leg beneath that chandelier of trinkets and keys to press the gas?

The dog leapt about, rocking the car, ecstatic to see the woman. She knelt to speak into the open slit of window. “Bozo,” he was named. She was desperately trying to calm him. “He’ll have a seizure otherwise,” she explained to Hugh. “Honey, honey, honey,” she crooned into the opening. A flash of lightning snapped overhead, followed quickly by the boom of thunder.

“Baby, baby, baby!” the woman pleaded. But she and the storm had succeeded only in agitating the dog further. She began to cry, worked up like her pet, bouncing from foot to foot, hands at the glass, fingers at his nose. Sure enough, the dog’s enthusiastic anxiety suddenly became something else—he turned a full, albeit circumscribed, circle and fell on his side, then lapsed into a spastic jerking and twitching on the seat, mouth gone rubbery, legs kicking out as if swimming, testicles, Hugh noted, as big as chicken eggs. The first drops of rain began splattering the parking lot.

Hugh responded to the woman’s crying, he thought later, rather than the dog’s seizure or the storm, the distressed human rather than the flailing animal and angry sky, when he picked up a rock from the decorative parking lot landscaping and crashed it through the driver-side window.

He failed to notice the clues—not so subtle: french fries on the floorboard, pacifier in the ashtray—of this woman’s life: wife, and mother of three small children. Instead, he focused on putting her into contact with her pet, getting them both out of the rain. “This is
just
what I kept imagining,” she cried to Hugh. “That whole time while Ms. Fox was talking about the five senses, I was imagining Bozo having a seizure out here and me not getting to him.” Bozo’s seizure only lasted sixty seconds or so, but it was a long minute. The woman had rifled around in her purse in search of the dog’s pills, chanting a harmless bit of profanity, the profanity of a parent, “dang, dang, dang,” and not finding the meds.

All four doors hung open now, rain spotting the interior panels, Hugh sitting in the passenger front seat while the woman laid herself alongside the dog in the back. Her skirt was hiked up on her thigh and Hugh just stared. She had soft white flesh, with small veins of pink and blue. He could see the point, just above her knee, where she drew the shaving line. There was a sack of groceries on the front floorboard, and a jug bottle of wine, which Hugh touched reflexively, seeing if it was too warm to drink. The rain was evaporating on the parking lot pavement as it hit; sunshine pierced through for a moment, then disappeared. This woman’s car was filled with stuff, as if she and Bozo lived in it. No wonder she’d begun thinking of it, as that had been the prompt for their first writing exercise.
Using the five senses, describe a place with which you are very familiar.

Lulu, the old lady, had raised her hand to say, quite certainly, that she believed there was a
sixth
sense. Ms. Fox had given her a look like a lizard’s. Poor Lulu; she was the one who’d brought her bag of yarn and needles to class and gotten them all off on the wrong foot with Ms. Fox. A distant rumble of thunder had then startled the group, and Hugh had bet it would probably make its way into all of their assignments.

When the dog had quit twitching, the woman sat up behind Hugh and scowled at herself in the rearview mirror, picking at her disheveled hair. The dog sat up beside her, dazed, his tongue exploring his teeth, his enormous black testicles a fascination on the seat. Hugh’s hand was bloody, which was also something they’d learned about in the first half of Advanced Creative Writing, Prose class. A sudden appearance of a complication, a visceral result and detail. Here was that “happy accident” Ms. Fox had predicted, a bleeding hand to deal with now that the dog was becalmed. “Put enough tangible business in your work and a happy accident might occur.”

The happier accident was the woman’s willingness to—insistence on—take Hugh to the emergency room for stitches. Apparently his fist had followed the stone through the glass. Yet he hadn’t felt particular pain—it was as if the sound of breaking glass, the sight of the writhing dog, the proximity of the woman’s distress, the storm brewing overhead, as if an overload of other sensations had masked this one. In a way, Hugh was relieved to discover how absentminded he was even when he wasn’t drinking. His drinking began these days after he’d returned from class. Before his going back to college, cocktails had been creeping up on him and his father. Who knew what might happen, now that he lived alone? Taking classes had successfully delayed his first drink at least a couple of days a week. And creative writing, so far, had been better than car repair or pottery. Had he been drinking this evening, he would have blamed that for his ripped knuckles.

While the doctor pulled the thread through Hugh’s hand, Stacy—they’d exchanged names on the way to Wesley Medical Center’s urgent care—took Bozo on a walk around the parking lot. Over the white dividers of the ER cubicles, through the slats of shades bisecting the stormy sunset, Hugh could see her pass back and forth, the dog dragging her, her arm outstretched and her legs stumbling along in his wake. He was a big strong animal, utterly untrained, unneutered, Hugh recalled, and the wind was fierce enough to make Stacy’s skirt fly up. She could not control both things at once. She kept squinting in the direction of the automatic doors, waiting for him, Hugh thought.

“Ms. Fox will think we hated her class,” she said when he finally came out, coaxing Bozo back into her car, tugging at her skirt.