“Great.”
He bent over and turned on the stereo and it lit up with blue digital numbers. He pushed a button and the tray slid out and he started taking the CDs out of their cases. Of course he had a few already in there and he had to stop and find the boxes for them. She heard scratching at the back door again.
“You must have a trained coon,” she said, and laughed.
Merlot looked at her.
“Why’s that?”
She took another drink of her wine. It was really good and she was starting to float a little bit on it and the weed together.
“’Cause. He’s scratching like he wants in.”
Merlot just gave out this little nervous noise and went back to what he was doing. And she was going to have to get up and go pee. She’d meant to do that before she came in here.
“You don’t mind if I use your bathroom?”
“Oh no, go right ahead,” Merlot said. He was putting the Leonard CDs onto the tray. He pushed the button and the tray slid closed. He pushed another button and the upbeat tempo of “Closing Time” started up. She set her wine on the coffee table. It sounded good. She got up and heard her knees creak a little.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
“I’m going back to the kitchen for a minute,” he said.
“Why don’t you see what you got to eat while you’re back there?”
“Well…”
“Or we can order something. I’ve got some money.”
“Well…”
She went down the hall ahead of him and looked at the door when she went by. It was closed, but the bathroom door was still open. She went in and he went past her and she shut the door and went over to the commode and put the seat down. She thought she heard the back door open just as she started peeing and she thought she heard it close but it was hard to tell because of the music and because she was peeing so hard into the water. She stopped peeing to listen for a moment. Then she heard it, just barely. It sounded like he was talking to somebody. He wasn’t talking to the coon, was he? Man. She hadn’t been this stoned in a long time. She guessed she’d better slow down. And oh. She needed to go ahead and unload her gun. He seemed kind of nervous about that.
She finished and got up and pulled her panties and pants up and flushed the commode and glanced at herself in the mirror. She patted at her hair. Maybe she’d get something new done with it before long. She was about tired of the way it was now. And she wanted it to look nice for him.
She opened the door while the commode was still filling and went out into the hall and back into his office for her bag. Leonard was really booming and it was almost too loud, so she bent over and found the volume knob and turned it down to an easier-listening level when she got back in the living room.
She thought she’d better sit on the couch to unload the gun so that she wouldn’t risk dropping the bullets on the floor, so she did. She unzipped the side pocket of her bag and took it out and pulled it from the holster and started to push the release button on the side of the frame to free the cylinder, but suddenly Merlot was standing in the door of the room, and he looked kind of scared. She dropped the gun to her side and could see him take a big gulp.
“Penelope,” he said, and his voice was a little shaky. “I’ve got somebody you’ve got to meet.”
She looked at him curiously.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
Well, who in the world was it? She guessed maybe one of the neighbors had come over. Through the back door. Unless they came in the front door while she was in the bathroom. But she didn’t think she’d heard the door open.
“Oh,” she said. “Well. Maybe I should turn the music down,” she said, and she started to get up to do so, but he stopped her.
“No, it’s okay,” he said. “She likes Leonard.”
She?
And then she heard something coming up the hall, and it was that whining again, and it sounded like something scratching on the floor. No it didn’t. It sounded like something heavy pulling itself along the floor. And the whining was getting louder, faster, rising with excitement.
“Penelope,” he said. “I want you to meet Candy.”
Penelope looked at him. Then she looked at the floor, where he was looking. And then a nearly hairless boxer with scabs and open sores scattered over its hide pulled its skinny self around the corner and stopped. Under its two bright black eyes she could see two raw red open gaps like underlips. Its back legs were twisted sideways, flat and lifeless like her mamaw’s awful dog, and it was drooling and it had no teeth, only black gums, and it was grinning at her with them, and it started pulling itself toward her faster on its front legs with its toenails making more scratches on the floor and it was whining excitedly and it smelled like dog shit and when it opened its mouth and puked on her feet she freaked out and shot it four times BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! as fast as she could pull the trigger.
89
Wayne woke up again, just at dark, just as they passed the exit for Dollywood in the mountains near Knoxville. He pulled his cap from over his eyes and looked through the window of the bus. There was a billboard in tall grass lit by spotlights on the side of I-40 and there was a Dolly on it about fifteen feet high and her blond coif stuck up above the sign a good two or three feet.
He was getting hungry. The driver had let them off the bus for twenty-five minutes at a Waffle House near Asheville and he’d eaten some ham and eggs there and now he was wondering how much longer it would be before they stopped for food again.
He knew the plane was faster, but the bus was cheaper. Much cheaper. They didn’t serve drinks on it, but it had a bathroom, and you could sleep, or read, or watch the countryside go by. The time passed eventually. All you had to do was sit there and the different parts of America would roll past. You didn’t have to worry about anything. You could think about all the money you saved by taking the bus instead of a plane. And that was important if you were thinking about saving your money for the future. Because the future was an unpredictable thing. Oh yeah.
He’d had to ride all the way to Raleigh to catch the bus to Memphis. Three hours up there, then waiting around in the bus station, looking at the people, some guy with glasses on a microphone, calling out arrivals and departures.
His head had been hurting a little. He’d picked up a fishing magazine from where somebody had left it in the seat pocket in front of him, and had flipped through it, looking at the pictures, reading a few of the ads, but when he’d tried to concentrate on an article about hand-grabbling for monster Mississippi River catfish, his vision had blurred on him again and it had scared him so badly he’d put the magazine away and just contented himself with looking out the window at the rapidly fading daylight and thinking about her. And then he’d gone to sleep.
There wasn’t a lot to see now that it had gotten dark, mostly just a black highway with the same stuff passing by over and over. Red Roof Inn. Huddle House. Texaco. BP. Holiday Inn. Buick. Toyota. Days Inn. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Hardee’s. Harley-Davidson. There were always cars passing, and trucks, and even other buses, and Wayne liked sitting high in the bus seats, able to look down on the cars, and right across the windows into the cabs of the trucks. Sometimes the drivers waved, but it was dark on the bus except for a few reading lights people had turned on here and there, and Wayne knew the drivers wouldn’t be able to see him if he waved back. So he didn’t.
He knew now that there was something wrong with his head. But he didn’t want to know what it was yet. That was too scary a thing to think about. So he watched things pass through the night in Tennessee, and thought about a country girl who was growing ever closer to him.
90
Penelope was gone, and Merlot knew she wouldn’t be coming back. He was sitting in the living room and he had mopped up all the blood. The bucket and the mop were still sitting there. There were four bullet holes in the floor in a tight group. And he had turned off Leonard now.
Candy’
s tortured breathing, the ragged sound of her breath through her nostrils, was missing from the silence of the night. She was lying close to the back door now, wrapped in an old quilt that his grandmother had made, and slipped inside a plastic garbage bag to keep the blood off the linoleum. He would bury her under one of the trees in the backyard tomorrow, and maybe one day he could go down to the Yocona River and find a small suitable stone to mark her grave. Something smooth and round maybe. A river stone.
He saw now that he’d done wrong by her. What man who truly loved his dog wouldn’t put it to sleep when it became too hard for it to live? Even Marla had agreed, Marla who was old and wise, Marla who knew she’d be out of a job dog-sitting if the dog was no longer around. Her purpose around here would completely disappear. But even she had said a long time ago that it was time.
Giving Candy a bath had been the worst. It was such a job to get her out of the tub, because she was dripping water everywhere, and it was running off her legs, and you were getting your clothes wet, and she still weighed almost forty pounds, and she couldn’t do anything to help you with her. But she knew you were trying to help her, that was the thing. She’d look at you with eyes of love after you got her dried off and back in her bed. Sometimes, when she felt good after a bath, she’d even try to bark, but of course nothing came out except the same half-yelping noises she’d made at the back door when Penelope was sitting right over there.
He couldn’t blame Penelope. He couldn’t blame Candy. He should have been straight with Penelope about it from the start. But that wasn’t what he’d done, was it?
No. He’d chosen to try and evade the whole thing, had tried to hide what he couldn’t, not with her in the house. He had tried to hide his best friend. And why? Because he was ashamed of what he had let her become.
She’d gotten to where she couldn’t eat much anymore in the last few months. What little Purina she did eat he’d had to soften with warm water and mash up with a spoon. She’d let him know with whining when she needed to be carried out and laid down in the backyard, away from the walk. If he wasn’t asleep. Sometimes in the middle of the night he was, and didn’t hear her, and had to clean up a mess the next morning before he met his first class. But that was over now.
Her eyes had been open before he’d wrapped her in the quilt and they had glassed over in a way Merlot had seen on a deer that had been in the back of somebody’s pickup in the parking lot of James’s Food Center one fall afternoon before they’d torn it down. They’d always had the best tomatoes.
He didn’t cry. He turned the light off and went into his bedroom and turned that light on and got a favorite sweatshirt from the closet, and pulled it over his head and chest, and looked down at it. It was a black one from Wofford College, with yellow letters, and the team name was on the sweatshirt: “Wofford Terriers.” He took off his boots and found his house shoes, and slipped them on, and went back to the kitchen and reached into the cabinet for a short clean glass. He put some ice cubes in the glass and bent over and pulled out a canned Coke from a twelve-pack that was open on the floor and then he reached into another cabinet and pulled out a fifth of Crown in its little blue cloth bag. He mixed a good strong drink and then sat down on one of the stools and sipped it.
It was quiet in the kitchen. The overhead light buzzed just a bit, but it was one of those things you get used to that keeps everything sounding safe and the same. After a while he turned it off and turned on the one over the stove. That made it a little dark, but not too dark to see. After he’d finished that drink, he mixed another one, and went back up the hall to his room.
The weathered case was upright inside the closet, and he set it on the bed to unfasten the snaps. When he lifted the lid, he looked at the sleek black finish and the shiny bronze strings and the single mother-of-pearl word inlaid above the ivory tuning pegs: “Gibson.” He pulled it out of the case and got a pick and his pitch pipe and a capo from the worn velvet box inside the case and went back to the kitchen with all of it.
He tuned it sitting on the stool, knowing she was lying back there by the door, dead, knowing she was getting cold, knowing nobody else would understand because she was just a dog. He had to go back to the top string a couple of times and blow on the pitch pipe and hit the string with the pick while turning the peg until he was sure he had that string in tune, and then he worked his way down, going from one to the other, going back and checking to see how it sounded, turning the pegs slightly, listening, comparing how one string sounded as opposed to the one pressed to the fret above it. He was very patient with it, but it had taken him years to learn it as well as the patience. And he didn’t play as much as he used to. Work. School. Taking care of Candy, too. So he took his time now and sipped his whiskey and made sure all his strings sounded in tune before he tried to make a chord.
When he thought he had them all good, he made a G chord and hit a downward stroke with the pick. It rang like a bell, the opening sound of something that wanted something else to follow it. He set the pick down for a second and took a sip from his drink. And then he got the pick back in his fingers and started playing and singing a song Elvis had done once, “Old Shep,” there in the kitchen with a full bottle of Crown, and a dead old dog on the floor, by the door, and the rest of Oxford mostly asleep around him.
At two he was still sitting there and playing. His fingers hadn’t completely lost their calluses but they were starting to get a little sore. So he stopped for a few minutes and put the guitar carefully on its back on top of the counter and mixed another drink.
What did you do in the middle of the night? Who was there to talk to since even the bars were closed? And who would listen to such a story? Would anybody want some stranger’s dog troubles poured on him?
He picked up his guitar again and looked at it. It was very old, the reason it sounded so good. The one good thing his daddy had left him, made in 1945. The more it was played, the better it sounded, to the point where it would fairly resonate on its own after a couple of hours of playing. Merlot was trying to get it to that place. He was trying to get it warm with its own music from within itself. And it was going to take more whiskey.
And the crazy asshole cigar-smoking butcher running around, escaped from the hospital, no telling who he was or where he came from. And if it hadn’t been for him, he wouldn’t have even met Penelope. He might have seen her in a patrol car one day somewhere, and maybe would have glanced at her for just a second, and then he would have turned his face back to the red light in front of him, and waited for it to change.
He sipped at his drink and picked up the guitar again and got his pick. He sat there, just strumming, and picking out notes on the strings, doing little runs he’d known for years, things he didn’t even have to think about much to play. It sounded good in the kitchen, and the gentle sound of it rang into the corners where maybe the mice listened.
He put the capo up on the third fret and made a D chord and teased the strings with the pick, making little ringing notes that warbled and floated.
Then he put the guitar down and went out on the front porch and looked down the street. It was too cold for crickets, or those vivid green tree frogs that sang their little songs so sweetly in the thick heat of summer nights. But he’d heard them many times from here.
He’d stood on the sidewalk and watched her go out of sight down the dark street, with her head down, and her small bag under her arm, and her hands in the pockets of her coat, passing from pool to pool of street lamp light like something that had stuck with him from an old black-and-white TV program he’d watched once with his daddy when he was just a little bitty thing, Jimmy Durante closing his show. Taking his hat off to show the few hairs combed over on his head. It had been a long long time ago, but Merlot remembered what he’d said: Good night, Mrs. Calabash. Wherever you are.
He went back inside and closed the door. It was cold out there.
91
Just like Miss Muffett had figured, the tub was full of cold dirt
y water and the bathroom was a sight to make a housekeeper want to puke. It looked like the little son of a bitch had pulled a couple of clean white towels down from the hangers with his teeth and rolled in them to dry off, but now they were more brown than white, and soggy and wet on the tiles. And not only that, but he’d evidently slung the water from himself as dogs do, after he got out, she guessed, or maybe even while he was still in it, and the dirty water had splattered all over the walls, and run down them, had splattered all over the toilet and the vanity, all over the floor and the tub curtains and the neat little blue rugs that stayed in there. It made her want to actually kill him. And hell. The gun was right down there in her purse. Fucking thing was loaded, too.
But some people will shoot a dog and some won’t.
And where was he now? Where was her leg? Why would anybody want to keep such a crappy job? What if she just walked out the door?
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She was trapped and she knew she was trapped. So instead, she made herself a big hamburger patty out of some of that fresh meat Mr. Hamburger had been working on for the last few nights, had gone out to the shed on her crutches and looked in the cooler and there was some meat that looked like fresh hamburger, but since it didn’t say “Hamburger Dog” on it like the dog meat always did, she figured it was for her instead of the little dog. She’d taken it back inside and opened it and made that nice thick patty, had the black iron skillet hot already, laid that baby in there and salted and peppered it good, grabbed an onion out of the crisper and peeled it and cried some stinging tears and then sliced it on a wooden board with a sharp knife and dropped those white round beauties in there as the meat started sizzling.