Here to Stay (16 page)

Elijah thanked God for this child, who behaved so perfectly, while Cole, rooting through bags at the counter, pulled out a bottle of bourbon and promptly began mixing drinks. “Elijah, anything for you?”

“No, thank you.” He wasn’t a teetotaler, but he drank seldom, and then only a glass of wine or an occasional beer.

He watched Eddy and his mother make their way to the living room, where his mother exclaimed over the tree.

The house had an open plan, the living room and kitchen adjoined. Now stockings hung by the hearth, Ezra’s, too, though he would be on his way to Europe the next day.

Cole, rattling ice in his glass, came into the living room. “Hi, there, Eddy,” he said.

“Hello, Uncle Cole,” she replied politely. “Where’s Silas?”

“Gone to the dogs, I think,” he laughed. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Mom’s with him,” Elijah explained to his daughter. Then he thought unexpectedly of the exception to the rule, how even when he was fairly small, Gene had taken to lying down in the kennels.

S
ILAS
W
ORKMAN STARED
at Round-Off through the chainlink fence. “Can he come out?”

“Round-Off is a she,” Sissy said, “and I think she’d like to come out. She likes to chase her ball.”

Sissy carefully opened the kennel door, releasing only Round-Off and not her sister Spring—Genesis’s Handspring. Spring was a bit nippy when excited. Also, Sissy knew Silas was a child who liked to run and yell, and the combination of the two tended to excite dogs.

“Gentle, Round-Off,” she told the bitch, who gently put her nose up to Silas’s small face and touched him with her pink tongue.

Silas giggled.

“Round-Off, get your ball,” Sissy suggested, and Round-Off sprang across the yard, looking about until she found her red rubber ball which she brought back to Sissy. “Do you want to throw it for her?” she asked Silas.

Silas said, “Yes!” and made to snatch the ball.

Sissy did not relinquish it. “Slow down a little, Silas. The dogs aren’t so used to children making fast move
ments around them.” Then she handed the ball to her small nephew.

Silas threw it in the way five-year-olds throw, and Round-Off dashed after it, brought it back and sat in front of the boy.

Sissy reflected that if Ezra were here, he would spend his family time with them and then, as soon as he could, rush away to visit high school friends he hadn’t seen since his last time home.

Yet here was Silas, whose home life was far less than ideal, who was a small child on Christmas Eve. Not her child, but she could add to his joy on Christmas, and maybe that would help stave off her disappointment at not having Ezra home.

She and Elijah had bought him a Playmobil set for Christmas. Sweaters for Maureen and Rosemary, a coffeemaker for Cole.

Her mother had been coming to their house for Christmas every year for many years now.

Sissy told herself that her mother had lived a full life, that it must be, in very old age, a relief to leave this life, that at least she’d been independent till the end of her days.

When they came inside, Round-Off joined them. Oscar already waited, still depressed at the loss of his mistress. Her mother’s dogs had adjusted well to their change of home—at least the dogs with whom they’d always lived came along—but Oscar was a people dog, and he had loved Heloise Atherton. He was the kind of dog who had seemed to take responsibility for his owner. Now he appeared particularly interested in Eddy, but it wasn’t until Gene arrived that he really perked up.

Gene said, “Hello, Oscar,” in the same uninflected
tone in which he said everything. The dog wagged his tail and followed him through the house, and when Gene sat down in the living room, Oscar lay at his feet.

Noticing the change in the dog at Gene’s arrival, Sissy wondered if the animal might not be happier with her son. But could she trust Gene to care for such a valuable dog?

Of course, Sissy. He’s got a building full of arachnids that he raises with care.

Still, this dog was Sissy’s hope to strengthen the lines of her kennel, and she was in no hurry to let him out of her sight.

Cole said, “Can I offer you a whiskey, Gene?”

Gene looked at his uncle without interest. “I don’t drink.”

“Ah,” said Cole. “A chip off the old puritanical block.”

Sissy withheld a hiss of annoyance.

Gene said, “The Puritans were Protestants. My father is Catholic.”

Unexpectedly, Rosemary erupted in laughter. She reached over and patted her grandson’s hand.

Gene jumped up, causing Oscar to leap up, too, and walked out of the house.

Sissy wanted to burst into tears. He would get in the car and drive home now. Damn, damn, damn.

But she didn’t hear the car start. Maybe he had gone out to the kennels instead.

“I forgot,” Rosemary said, showing her own sharpness in remembering that she’d forgotten her grandson disliked being touched.

Kennedy and Gerry would not be here this Christmas; they were spending the holiday in Kansas City
with Gerry’s parents. So eventually, the family sat down to dinner. Gene came inside and sat down with them.

Cole said, “Did you get over it?”

Gene behaved as though he wasn’t being addressed.

Maureen looked miserable.

Elijah said grace, and they passed dishes, Maureen serving her mother.

“So, how are the bugs?” Cole asked Gene.

Elijah knew his brother-in-law was trying to be friendly, just as he knew that Gene had no special desire to be the center of attention and that he wasn’t going to associate the word
bugs
with his business, even to correct Cole.

He would behave as though he hadn’t been addressed, which he might believe to be the case, for all Elijah knew.

“I’ve acquired some Madagascar hissing cockroaches,” Gene said pleasantly.

“Can I have one?” said Eddy.

Rosemary shuddered eloquently.

“One,” said Sissy. “And nothing venomous.”

“What about the spiders and snakes?” Cole asked. “Got any brown recluses?”

“They’re a native species without much marketability,” Gene replied. “There are undoubtedly some in the crawl space of your house.”

“Hey, this kid could work for Orkin!” Cole exclaimed.

Gene did not respond to this.

Dinner passed uneventfully, Ezra called to wish them a merry Christmas. Hearing his voice, Sissy found it surprisingly easy not to cry. She was too concerned about the possibility of the now roundly drunk Cole offending Gene or the rest of them. He’d already told a dirty joke which she wished she hadn’t heard.

Eddy had listened, then walked out of the room and into her own bedroom and shut the door, a sign of her good breeding, Sissy thought, and probably also of her desire that Cole would leave their family in peace to enjoy Christmas Eve.

When the time came to leave for Midnight mass, Cole was too drunk to drive, but believed himself to be fully capable. They had arrived in Elijah’s mother’s car, and Elijah said, “Sissy, I’ll drive these folks, and you and Eddy can ride with Gene.”

Cole said, “I’m going to drive to church, just like I drove here.”

Silas pointed at Gene’s car, with its CB antenna. “Can we ride in that car? It has a CB.”

Though Gene disliked the telephone, his old black Buick was outfitted with a CB.

Gene said, “It seats only six. There are eight of us.”

Silas appealed to his mother. “Can I ride with him.”

Maureen nodded, but Cole nearly snarled, “Silas, get in Grandma’s car
now
.”

Gene said, “You’re too drunk to drive, Uncle Cole. You’ll get a DUI, and then the roads will be safer.” He walked away over the snowy drive to his car and opened the passenger door for Silas.

Sissy raced to her son’s car. “Backseat, Silas. Ladies get to ride in front.”

“But then I can’t talk on the CB!”

Eddy climbed in behind the driver’s seat.

Seeing Elijah slide behind the wheel of his mother’s car, despite Cole’s ugly looks, Sissy buckled Silas into the front seat of Gene’s car and climbed into the back with her daughter. With a small smile over the way her
son had stood up to his uncle, she said, “I’m very proud of you, Gene.”

Gene said, “Thank you, Mother.” In his methodical way, he looked about the car to make sure all his passengers were wearing their seat belts, then he started the car and turned on the headlights.

When my uncle Silas died, I took his dogs. Billy Bob, a five-year-old brindle, did not accept my ownership. He found elaborate ways to escape, and he’d return to Uncle Silas’s place. I would find Billy Bob there, lying on the back porch, waiting for his master to return.

—
Among the God Dogs
, Elijah Workman, 1990

February 2, 1992

S
ISSY WAS GLAD
when Christmas was over and the new year came. Soon, Round-Off came into heat, and Sissy bred her to Oscar. Then she asked Gene if he would like Oscar to live with him.

Gene had come over for dinner, and Sissy asked him afterward, when they were sitting in the living room together, preparing to play cards, as he had with her mother for so many years. Gene particularly liked gin rummy, but sometimes they played poker instead, though never for money.

He said, “You’ve never given me a dog, Mother.”

“Well, I wasn’t planning to
give
you Oscar. I just
wanted to know if you’d like him to live with you. I’d continue to buy his food and pay his vet bills.”

Gene looked at the dog, who lay beside him as though there was nowhere he’d rather be. “Thank you. I’d like that. Is this because I told Uncle Cole he was too drunk to drive?”

“No,” said Sissy. “I just think you’re a responsible person.”

Eddy came in the back door while the others were playing cards. She’d been babysitting Allie Morgan’s niece, Samantha.

Eddy said, “Samantha knows all her ABCs! She did it for her mom when they got home.”

“Did you teach her that?” asked Sissy, impressed with her daughter’s maturity and sense of responsibility.

“I
helped
. Her parents have been working with her, too, but this is the first time she’s gotten them all.”

Sissy remembered when she’d confessed to Allie that she was thinking of leaving Elijah—and she remembered Allie’s reaction. These days, Sissy never thought of leaving. She thought she wouldn’t be able to cope if something happened to Elijah.

He had become the Humane Society’s leading investigator of dogfighting rings. Several times he had been asked to divorce himself from Genesis Kennels. It had been called a conflict of interest. He had refused, arguing his case, and no one at the Humane Society wanted to lose him. Now he was in a position where he could quit; the royalties from his books provided enough of an income.

Sissy wanted him to quit, not because she disliked the Humane Society or because many people in the
Humane Society were so thoroughly against the breeding of purebred dogs or keeping animals as pets. She wanted Elijah to quit because the work had become increasingly dangerous.

Dogfights were staged by the criminal underworld. Usually dogfighting went hand in hand with drugs, prostitution, guns, violence. The stakes and the risks were high.

He was on the road in all kinds of weather, sometimes driving hundreds of miles to matches. He did not speak of what he saw at home, but Sissy had been woken more than once by his disturbed sleep.

Sissy knew he’d be gone all night tonight. He never told her precisely where he was going when he was working. He would say no more than “south” or something even less specific. He would call her from the road when it was all over to tell her he was safe. Sissy understood that he believed that if his cover was blown these people could come for his family or something like that. What he did was a mystery to her, unlike that first dogfight they’d attended decades before, when the laws were weaker, when those involved could expect no more than a slap on the hand.

Now what troubled him, he said, was that the people matching dogs were so often kids, teenagers.

“Why don’t they train dogs in Obedience?” Sissy had asked.

“They’re trying to make money, Sissy.”

She knew how little financial profit there was in obedience training.

“You won’t ever let him off-lead?” Sissy pressed suddenly to Gene. “I mean, outside Grandma’s yard or the house. When you’re
out
.”

Gene thought this over. “All right. He comes when he’s called, you know.”

“Yes, but still.”

“All right,” he repeated.

Eddy joined them in the living room.

“Oscar’s going to live with Gene,” Sissy told her daughter.

Eddy looked interested. “Mom, can I have a snake?”

To go with her hissing cockroach.

“Aren’t snakes more high-maintenance than cockroaches?” asked Sissy. Though a copperhead had once bitten Ezra, Sissy was not revolted by snakes in the way she was by scorpions.

Gene said, “Corn snakes are native. They don’t require the same level of attention to humidity that ball pythons do, for instance.”

“How big do they get?” Sissy asked. “And what do they eat?”

“Frozen-thawed mice,” Gene said. “That should be no problem with a corn snake. Sometimes ball pythons are a bit picky. Eddy could have one from one of the clutches this summer. They get about four feet long, Mother.”

“If you can wait till this summer,” Sissy told Eddy, “and if it’s all right with your father, then the answer is yes.”

That same night

T
HE STAGED FIGHTS
were in Des Moines. Elijah showed up with Keller—a recent pit bull rescue renamed from Killer—and a shifty look. He’d heard of the fights, he said, from a guy downtown.

This group of dog owners was unusually youthful,
predominantly black and mixed race, and Elijah felt out of place. He’d barely learned to navigate safely among gangs, and he knew there were gang members here. He had a bad feeling and knew enough to pay attention to it.

But he was already in, at the abandoned house on the outskirts of town. There were young girls, too, and an older black man who looked to Elijah like a pimp.

Elijah knew abruptly that he needed to walk away from this. He stuck out like a sore thumb, he was afraid, and he knew that other people could smell and feel fear. He made his way back to the entrance.

The doorman looked at him but didn’t object when Elijah walked out.

Across the street, the door of a burgundy sedan slammed, and an attractive black woman in high heels, dressed in a black pantsuit that a businesswoman might wear, strode across the street.

Elijah was arrested by the sight of her. She was beautiful, and she didn’t fit in here. She headed into the house, and he heard her shouting at someone, and then one of the gang members was pushing her outside.

She yelled, “Jackson Trimball, you get out here right now!”

The doorman blocked her from going back inside the building. He made a vaguely apologetic gesture, smooth and urbane.

Elijah was still in sight of the building. He couldn’t do anything but keep going, get to his own vehicle, a ten-year-old Toyota 4-Runner, parked several blocks away. He couldn’t go to the rescue of this woman, if she needed it.

He hurried without looking as though he was hurrying,
feeling like a coward when it wasn’t cowardice but duty to his job that had kept him from exposing himself.

He glanced back and saw the woman lunge at the doorman.

His instincts continued to tell him to leave.

Then the woman was down, and there were three tall young men staring at her, their message plain. She needed to leave.

Elijah kept walking with Keller, hating himself.

At his truck, he put Keller in the back, looked in his rearview mirror and finally saw headlights coming up the street. The burgundy car.

The woman was holding something to her face, a piece of fabric.

Let it go, Elijah.

Another car followed her, and Elijah recognized it because it had been parked outside the abandoned house. The dogfighters were going to make sure she left. Maybe make sure of other things, too.

Elijah pulled out his cell and punched the code for his partner with the Des Moines police, who was supposed to raid the fight. He briefly related what had happened, then gave the license numbers of the two cars he was following. “Can you check on this lady?” he asked. “Make sure she’s okay.”

“This isn’t going according to plan,” the policeman replied. “Did they make you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“We’re going to raid. Can’t do anything about this lady. Wouldn’t worry about it.”

Easy for him to say.

Elijah followed the two cars along the highway, but
eventually the car with the gang members in it turned off the road, no doubt heading back to the fights.

The woman was going to be okay. She’d make it home.

Her son was in a gang and matching dogs, that had to be what she’d been doing there, and Elijah wanted to help her.

But he had no pretext for doing so.

He headed south.

S
ISSY STARTED
out of her sleep. Elijah. He was there in the bedroom, home in the middle of the night.

“You’re back,” she said.

“I’m resigning,” he said. He couldn’t tell her all the whys. That the house had been full of kids, kids younger than his sons, even some boys who looked Eddy’s age, wasn’t the whole answer.

That he hadn’t gone to the aid of a woman in distress wasn’t the whole answer, either.

It had to do with something else, that he’d felt a dangerous curiosity and attraction toward the woman, that he’d wanted to follow her all the way home, to ask her what she’d been doing there, to offer to help her with her son. Which was all so much romantic fantasy.

And it wasn’t the first time he’d found other women attractive since he’d been married to Sissy, nor the first time he’d thought of trying to meet one. What bothered him was that this time he’d actually been afraid he would go through with it and afraid of the reason behind it.

For the first time, he’d begun to find his world with Sissy narrow and had really considered venturing outside its confines. And he’d begun to rationalize why he was doing so.

He hadn’t, of course, and he didn’t know the name of the woman he’d seen at the house. He’d been impressed by her fierce determination to get her son out of there.

And some small place inside him had remembered that Sissy had deceived him about Ezra’s parentage.

As though that might excuse his straying.

He didn’t want to stray, to be the kind of person who strayed, and so he would remove himself from temptation and focus on writing and the kennels and being close to Sissy.

“What will you do?” Sissy asked.

“Something,” he said. “Maybe something positive.”

Sissy said, “You’re not going to be unemployed, are you?”

Elijah was undressing, and he glanced toward the bed. “No, Sissy. I’m not planning to stop working.” Ironic, he thought, that it was a step he was taking for her, and now she was reacting badly to it, when she’d so many times said she wished he would find something else. “I put Keller in the end kennel, the Pre-fert.”

“Who is Keller?”

“Pit bull, rescued last week in Jefferson City. She’s nice.”

“To people,” Sissy remarked. “We can’t have her here.” She would attack one of their dogs, the show dogs, and do real damage.

“I know,” Elijah said tiredly. “But I didn’t want to take her back to the pound before I came home tonight.”

“I hope she can’t get out,” Sissy said.

Elijah looked into the future with a feeling of depression and dread. A future of Sissy and her Westminster dreams.

She said, “I let Gene take Oscar home.”

This surprised Elijah and touched him. He’d noticed Sissy’s increasing appreciation for Gene since her mother’s death. “Was he pleased?”

“Oh, you know Gene. I think so.”

Elijah laughed softly and climbed into bed, reaching for her, for her familiar shape and her familiar scent and accepting her familiar values, her unchanging selfishness.

“And Eddy wants a snake.”

Elijah gave a small shudder. He didn’t care for them.

“I’ll protect you,” Sissy told him.

July 3, 1992

G
ENE HAD INVITED
his parents to come over to his house, Sissy’s childhood home, on their anniversary. He wanted, he said, to surprise them.

Sissy had never known their anniversary to occur under so much strain. Since quitting work for the Humane Society, Elijah had been writing more than ever and was trying his hand at fiction—science-fiction, no less, featuring a Humane Society investigator in a future age. His agent was excited about the premise.

Unfortunately, however, Elijah was also looking into starting a nonprofit. He’d told Sissy, “Sometimes the problem with taking the animals out of the home is that the people causing the problems will start on the kids.” He believed that right treatment of people could be developed from first learning gentleness with animals, and he wanted to set up some kind of camp for disadvantaged kids where they would care for animals.

Sissy hated the idea. As far as she was concerned it
would mean that Elijah would make less money than he could writing full-time—he
was
successful—and that he’d be less involved with their
joint
business of Echo Springs Genesis German Shepherd Dogs.

He responded to her complaints predictably—with cool aloofness. In fact, he’d shown her so little warmth lately that she wondered if he would give her an anniversary gift this year. He hadn’t mentioned it so far.

She had bought something for him—a new laptop computer—
hint, hint, Elijah, be a writer, don’t start your nonprofit.
He’d seemed a little dismayed. Though he made more money writing than working for the Humane Society, he still thought of himself as being out of work.

Ezra, who was now an attorney in Chicago, said on the phone, “It’s his work ethic, Mom. That’s how Dad is.”

It distressed Sissy that Ezra chose to live so far from Echo Springs, but he insisted that he liked being in “the city.” There was no city in Missouri that he considered comparable to Chicago. Sissy couldn’t help wondering if Ezra stayed so far away because he felt less a part of their family than Gene did.

“I wonder how Gene is going to surprise us,” Sissy said for the third time as they drove to the house where she’d grown up, the house that had been her mother’s.

“Maybe with a pet snake,” Elijah said uneasily.