Bark: Stories

  “It’s not like you have a dog who won’t get along with mine,” she said.

  “I have plants.”

  “But plants are not a dog.”

  “Oh, I see: you’re one of those people who thinks animals are better, more important than plants!”

  She studied him, his eyes large with protest or with drugs or with madness. There were too many things to choose from. “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said and turned to unpack his things.

  Now she rose to take the dog for his daily walk. She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.

  The sublet she and Dench were in now was a nice one, a fluke, a modern, flat-roofed, stone-and-redwood ranch house with a carport in a neighborhood that was not far from the hospital and was therefore full of surgeons and radiologists and their families. The hospital itself was under construction and the cranes bisected the sky. Big-jawed excavators and backhoes worked beneath lights at night. Walking the dog, she once watched as an excavator’s mandibled head was released and fell to the ground; the headless neck then leaned down and began to nudge it, as if trying to find out if it might still be alive. Of course there was an operator, but after that it was hard to think of a creature like this as a machine. When a wall was knocked down, and its quiet secrets sent scattering, the lines between things seemed up for grabs.

  The person who owned their house was not connected to the hospital. He was an entrepreneur named Ian who had made a bundle in the nineties on some sort of business software and who for long stretches of time lived out of state—in Ibiza, Zihuatanejo, and Portland—in order to avoid the cold. The house came furnished except, strangely, for a bed, which they bought. On their first day they found food in the refrigerator with not even mold but dust on it. “I don’t know,” said Dench. “Look at the closets. This must be what Ian was using. With hooks this strong maybe we don’t need a bed. We can just hang ourselves there at night, like bats.”

  With Dench she knew, in an unspoken way, that she was the one who was supposed to get them to wherever it was they were going. She was supposed to be the GPS lady who, when you stopped for gas, said, “Get back on the highway.” She tried to be that voice with Dench: stubborn, unflappable, keeping to the map and not saying what she knew the GPS lady really wanted to say, which was not “Recalculating” but “What in fucking hell are you thinking?”

  “It all may look wrong from outer space, which is where a GPS is seeing it from,” Dench would say, when proposing alternatives of any sort, large or small, “but on the ground there’s a certain logic. Stick with me on this one. You can have all the others.”

  There were no sidewalks in this wooded part of town. The sap of the stick-bare trees was just stirring after what looked like a fierce fire of a winter. The roadside gullies that would soon warm and sprout joe-pye weed and pea were still just pebble-flecked mud, and KC’s dog, Cat, sniffed his way along, feeling the winter’s melt, the ground loosening its fertile odor of wakened worms. Overhead the dirt pearl sky of March hung low as a hat brim. The houses were sidled next to marshes and sycamores, and as she walked along the roads occasionally a car would pass, and she would yank on Cat’s leash to heel him close. The roads, all named after colleges out east—Dartmouth Drive, Wellesley Way, Sweet Briar Road; where was her alma mater, SUNY New Paltz Street?—were glistening with the flat glossy colors of flattened box turtles who’d made the spring crossing too slowly and were now stuck to the macadam, thin and shiny as magazine ads.

  HOSPICE CARE: IT’S NEVER TOO SOON TO CALL read a billboard near the coffee shop in what constituted the neighborhood’s commercial roar. Next to it a traffic sign read PASS WITH CARE. Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real. The largest part of the strip was occupied by an out-of-business bookstore whose plate-glass windows were already cloudy with dust. The D was missing from the sign so that it now read BOR ERS. In insolvency, truth: soon the chain would be shipping its entire stock to the latrines of Swaziland.

  Cat was a good dog, part corgi, part Lab, and if KC wore her sunglasses into the coffee shop he could pass for a Seeing Eye dog, and she a blind person, so she didn’t have to tie him to a parking sign out front.

  The coffee shop played Tom Waits and was elegantly equipped with dimpled cup sleeves, real cream, cinnamon sticks, shakers of sugar. KC got in line. “I love this song,” the man in front turned to say to her. He was holding a toddler, and was one of those new urban dads so old he looked like the kidnapper of his own child.

  She didn’t know what she felt about Tom Waits anymore: his voice had gotten so industrial. “I don’t know. I just think one shouldn’t have to wear goggles and a hard hat when listening to music,” she said. It was not a bad song and she didn’t feel that strongly about it, only sorry for her own paltry tunes, but the man’s face fell, and he turned away, with his child staring gloomily at her over his shoulder.

  She ordered a Venti latte, and while she was waiting, she read the top fold from the top paper in the stack below the shrink-wrapped CDs by the register. When she finished, she discreetly turned the paper over and read the bottom fold. This daily, fractured way of learning the front-page news—they had no Internet connection—she had gotten used to and even sighed about amusingly. Be resourceful! So their old newsletter had advised. This way of bringing Dench his morning coffee (she drank her half while walking back, burning her tongue a little) and getting the dog a walk was less resourceful than simply necessary. Sometimes she missed the greasy spoons of old, which she had still been able to find on the road when the band was touring and where a single waitress ran the register, the counter, all the tables, calling you “honey”—until you asked whether they had soy milk, at which point all endearments ceased.

  Now she walked back via Princeton Place, a street she didn’t usually take, but one that ran parallel to her own. Taking different routes fortified the mind, the paper had said today. This street contained a sprawling white-brick house she had seen before and had been struck by—not just its elegance and size but the magical blue sea of squill that spread across its sloped and wooded lot. She had once seen two deer there, with long tails that flicked like horses’ and wagged like dogs’. And once she had seen such a deer close-up, along the road’s edge on Dartmouth. It had been hit so fast it had been decapitated, and its neck lay open like a severed cable bundle.

  Cat nosed along the gullies and a little up the driveways, whose cracks were often filled with clover.

  She stared at the wings of the white-brick house, which were either perfectly insulated or not heated at all, since there was still unmelted snow on the roofs. Suddenly an elderly man appeared by the mailbox. “Howdy,” he said. It startled her, and his stab at gregariousness belied his face, which bore a blasted-apart expression, like that of a balding, white-haired Jesus on the cross, eyes open wide and worried, his finely lined mouth the drawstring purse of the aged and fair.

  “Just getting my newspaper,” he said. “Nice dog.”

  “Hey, Catsy, get back here.” She tried to pull the leash in, but its automated spring was broken and the leash kept unspooling.

  The man’s face brightened. He had started to take his paper out of its plastic sleeve but stopped. “What’s the dog’s name? Cathy?” He did not scrunch up his face disapprovingly when he failed to hear what you said, the way deaf people often did. But he did have the recognizable waxen pee smell of an old man. It was from sweat that no longer could be liquid but accumulated like scaly air on the skin.

  “Uh, Cat. It’s part family name, part, um, joke.” She wasn’t going to get into all the Katherines in her family or her personal refrigerator magnet altar to Cat Power or the general sick sense of humor that had led this dog, like all pets, to be a canvas upon which one wrote one’s warped love and dubious wit. r />
  “I get it.” He grinned eagerly. “And what’s your name?”

  “KC,” she said. Let that suffice.

  “Casey?”

  “Yes,” she said. A life could rhyme with a life—it could be a jostling close call that one mistook for the thing itself.

  “We live the next block over. We’re renting.”

  “Renting! Well, that explains it.”

  She didn’t dare ask what it explained. Still, his eyes had a wet dazzle—or an amused glint—and were not disapproving. Cat started to bark loudly at a rabbit but then also turned and started barking at the man, who took a theatrical step back, raised the paper over his head, and pretended to be afraid, as if he were performing for a small child. “Don’t take my crossword puzzle!”

  “His bark is worse than his bite,” KC said. “Get over here, Cat.”

  “I don’t know why people always say that. No bark is worse than a bite. A bite is always worse.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t make rabbits so cute or we wouldn’t care if dogs ate them. Why are rabbits made so cute? What is nature’s purpose in that one?”

  He beamed. “So you’re a philosopher!”

  “No, not really,” she murmured as if in fact she thought she might be.

  “I think the rabbits are probably only accidentally cute to us. Mostly they’re cute to each other. The purpose? The new urban pest made palatable: more rabbit stew for everybody.”

  “I see. So you’re a sort of Mr. McGregor kind of guy. I was always scared of Mr. McGregor!” She smiled.

  “Nothing to be scared of. But it does seem of late that there is some kind of apocalyptic plague of rabbits. Biblical bunnies! Would you like to come and finish your coffee inside?”

  She didn’t know what to make of this invitation. Was it creepy or friendly? Who could tell anymore? Very few people had been friendly to them since they’d moved here two months ago. The man’s tea-stained teeth made a sepia smile—a dental X-ray from the nineteenth century.

  “Oh, thanks, I really should be going.” This time the leash caught and Cat came trotting toward her, bored and ready to move on.

  “Well, good to meet you,” the old man said and turned and walked back toward his house, with its portico and porch and two stone chimneys, its wings that stretched east and west and one out back smaller and south-facing, with a long double sleeping porch, she could barely see. Over here on Princeton Place things seemed bigger than they were on Wellesley Way. She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn’t stand the sight of it. This whole privileged neighborhood could use a neat little guillotine or some feed-capped crowds with pitchforks.

  “Good to meet you,” she said, though he hadn’t given her his name.

  “Here’s your coffee,” she said to Dench, who was still in bed.

  “Yum. Tepid backwash.”

  “Hey, don’t complain. You can go next time and bring me back half.”

  “I’m not complaining,” he said in a sleepy stretch. “But it’s like it took you longer this time.”

  She took a brush sharply to her scalp and began brushing. If she waited longer with her hair she might get twelve hundred. She threw it back and arched from her waist. Only in the mirror could she see her Decatur tattoo, put there one night in Linotype Gotharda in the crook of her neck, when they were playing in Decatur and she wanted to be reminded never to play there again. “That’s a strange way to be reminded,” Dench had said, and KC had said, “What better?”

  “Was there a big line at the coffee shop?” Dench asked, smacking his lips.

  “No. I stopped and talked to some guy. Cat is going up every driveway that ever had a squirrel or rabbit dash over it.”

  “Some guy?”

  “Geezer.”

  “Hey, this backwash is good. There’s something new in it. Were you wearing cherry ChapStick or something?”

  “Have you noticed that there are a lot of people with money around here?”

  “We should meet them. We need producers.”

  “You go meet them.” She would look up guillotine on the Internet on her next trip to the library.

  “You’re cuter. Of course, time is of the essence in these matters.”

  She loved Dench. She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn’t preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice—and the sound of his, which was worse. The portraits of hell never ceased and sometimes were done up in raucous, gilded frames to console. Romantic hope: From where did women get it? Certainly not from men, who were walking caveat emptors. No, women got it from other women, because in the end women would rather be rid of one another than have to endure themselves on a daily basis. So they urged each other into relationships. “He loves you! You can see it in his eyes!” they lied.

  “Casey!” the old man shouted the next morning. He was out in his front yard pounding together something that looked like a bird feeder on a post.

  “Hi!” she said.

  “You know my name?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Old family joke.” He still seemed to be shouting. “Actually my name is Milton Theale.”

  “Milton.” She repeated the name, a habit people with good memories supposedly relied on. “They don’t name kids Milton anymore.”

  “Too bad and thank God! My father’s name was Hi, short for Hiram, and now that I’m old I find my head filled up with his jokes and stories rather than very many of my own, which apparently I’ve forgotten.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, as long as you don’t actually come to believe you are your dad, I suppose all is well.”

  “Well, that may be next.”

  “Probably that’s always next. For all of us.”

  He squinted to study her, seemed to be admiring something about her again, but she was not sure what. No doubt something that was a complete mirage.

  “Nice to see you again,” he said. “And you, too,” he said to the dog. “Though you are a strange-looking thing. It’s like he’s been assembled by Nazi veterinarians—a shepherd’s head, a dachshund’s body, a—”

  “Yeah, I know. Sometimes he reminds me of the dog in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “The remake.”

  “The remake of what?”

  “Frankenstein!” she yelled. His deafness would give her a heart attack. Perhaps this was nature’s plan for old people to kill each other in an efficient if irritating fashion.

  She could feel the heat leaving the coffee and entering her hand. “He’s like a dog made in Frankenstein’s lab!” Sometimes she hated the dog. His obliviousness to the needs of others, his determined, verbally challenged conversation about his own desires—in a human this would indicate a severe personality disorder.

  “Oh, he’s not that bad,” said Milt. “And wouldn’t we like his energy. In tablet form.”

  “That would be fantastic.”

  “But you’re young; you wouldn’t need something like that.”

  “I need something.” Was she whining? She had never made such an announcement to a stranger before.

  “In lieu of that, come on in and have a blueberry muffin with me.” Again, the line between neighborliness and flirtation was not clear to her here. She knew in this community you had to do an extroverted kind of meet and greet, but she had heard of soccer parents wandering off from their children’s games and having sex in far parking lots. So the guidelines were murky and breachable. “And while you’re at it you can help me with the crossword puzzle.”

  “Oh, I can’t. I have to get home. Lot of things to tend to.”

  “Well, it’s not ten to. It’s ten past.”

  “To tend to,” KC repeated. Perhaps his deafness had exhausted all the other neighbors and this accounted for his friendliness to her. On the other hand, no one seemed to walk around here. Either they jogged, the
ir ears stuffed with music, or they drove their cars at murderous speeds. One old man could not have single-handedly caused that. Or could he have?

  “Hmmm?”

  “Gotta get home.”

  “Oh, OK,” he said and waved her on.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” she said out of kindness.

  He nodded and went back to work.

  She stopped and turned. “Are you making a bird feeder?”

  “No, it’s a book nook! I’ll put books inside and people can help themselves. Like a little library. Now that the bookstore is closed. I’m just adjusting the clasp.”

  “How lovely.” It was a varnished pine angled to look like the ski chalet of a doll.

  “Giving the old guy a thrill? Good idea.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m just saying,” said Dench in a hushed tone. “He’s probably loaded. And gonna keel soon. And …”

  “Stop.” This was the grifter in Dench, something violent in the name of freedom, like his father, who had fled through the men’s room window. “Don’t say another word.”

  “Hey—I’m not talking about murdering him! I’m just saying you could spend a little time, make him happy, and then the end result might be, well … we’d all be a little happier. Where’s the harm?”

  “You’ve really gone over to the dark side.” He could be shameless. Perhaps shamelessness kept bitterness at bay. Not a chance Dench could ever be bitter. Never even post-bitter. Bitterness came when one had done the long good thing and then gone unrewarded. Dench would never operate that way. She, on the other hand, had been born with a sort of pre-bitterness, casting about for the good and unacknowledged deed that would explain her feelings—and not coming up with it. So instead a sourness could beset her, which she had to appease and shrink with ice cream and biographies of Billie Holiday.

  “Hey, wasn’t it you who wrote, ‘Get your hands on some real meat’?” Now he began to sing. “ ‘An old shoe can be made chewy like game / but it takes a raftload of herbs and it’s just not the same.’ You wrote that.”