Dog on the Cross (6 page)

As Jansen had cleaned the bar, he'd contemplated how he would approach the man, what he might say. Numerous insults and chastisements ran through his mind, each more severe than the one before. Now, with Wisnat seated barely fifteen feet away, the bartender found himself at a loss. He was choked with anger, with bitterness and a sense of betrayal, but he did not know how to begin, how to give these things utterance. Perhaps there was something insufficiently developed about his thoughts, or he'd simply not had time to process them. Perhaps, Jansen realized, his tongue was rendered paralytic by the same force that had halted his words since he was a child.

He went over and took a seat opposite Wisnat. The two sat staring at each other, at the walls, at the table between them. When Jansen could no longer take it, he leaned forward in his chair.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what?” replied his friend.

The bartender felt himself beginning a retreat, but then recognized he had to, regardless of the discomfort, make a stand.

“I saw what you did,” he said.

“What
I
did?”

Jansen ignored this. “They were some kind of hair pill, weren't they? You gave her some kind of growth hormone.”

Crossing his arms, the barber shook his head,
looked, in blatant disinterest, toward the window. “You, you, you,” he muttered under his breath.

“All right then,” said Jansen, “
we.
”

Wisnat gestured toward his friend. “Try and remember that.”

“Why would I forget?”

“You're just as much to blame as I am.”

“Maybe.”

“No, not ‘maybe.'”

“Fine,” said Jansen, “I'm to blame.”

Wisnat, momentarily appeased, wiped a hand across his face, and the two once again grew quiet. Jansen felt as if his efforts had been undermined, and looking at the barber something in him crumpled. He began to wonder if he could forget the events of the previous month, if they could just go ahead now that the unpleasantness was at an end.

“Anyway,” he began in a friendlier tone, “I suppose it's over.”

“Suppose what's over?”

“Megan,” Jansen told him, motioning vaguely. “I suppose you're done with all of that.”

“What makes you think I'm done?”

Jansen didn't understand. “I mean,” he said, laughing nervously, “that that's usually it. Once you—”

“We didn't have sex, if that's what you're fumbling around.”

The bartender simply looked at the man. He didn't understand this either.

“Then where have you been?”

“Excuse me,
Dad.
”

“I'm serious, Dennis. Where were you all this time?”

“I don't think I have to tell you.”

“You were with her?”

The barber took a napkin from the dispenser and began tearing it into strips.

“You were with
Megan,
right?”

“You know, Jansen,” Wisnat told him, “you're very fucked up.”

“
I'm
fucked up?”

“Yes.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

Jansen felt blood rushing to his head. He was angry, but there was something alongside the anger, something he'd not experienced even in the days when he witnessed his friend's conquests. He was, it briefly occurred to him, jealous.

“You want to keep seeing her?”

“It's none of your business.”

“You're wrong,” he said, “it
is
my business. You made it my—”

“Jesus.”

“Please quit.”

“Quit what?”

Jansen broke off, cast around as if looking for someone to assist. “Just give me an answer, Wisnat.
Just a plain, simple answer. Stop worrying about whether or not it's my—”

“Fine,” said Wisnat, straightening in his chair and scooting to its edge, “what do you want to know?”

“Do-you-want-to-see-her-again?”

“Why wouldn't I?” he said.

“Because—”

“Because of the pills?”

The bartender nodded.

Wisnat looked to his feet. “That has nothing to do with it,” he explained. “Is it that hard for you to understand me wanting to be with someone else?”

Jansen noticed that he was standing, though he would never recall rising to his feet. His breath was coming in spurts and his hands were shaking so badly that he grabbed the edge of the table to steady them.

“Why?” he managed, his voice starting to crack.

Wisnat sat for several minutes as if choosing, carefully, his words. Finally, he looked up at Jansen, gave a brief smile. He asked the bartender if it would be too difficult to believe that he might just be in love.

There followed a period Jansen could not remember, a stretch of compressed time, filled, he thought, with screaming and (perhaps) a momentary scuffle, twenty years of words spilling nonsensically and in no particular order from his mouth. When he came to, he had Wisnat by the collars, pressed against the
wall. He was repeating the word
right,
unable to decide if it was a question or an answer or some ambiguous curse. Throughout, Wisnat's face remained surprisingly tranquil, as if this were something he'd been expecting all along.

Jansen grew suddenly quiet and his hands went slack. Wisnat took them carefully from his shirt and helped his housemate to a seat. The barber knelt in front of him, between Jansen's knees, placed a hand on either side of the man's face, cradling it almost. He exhaled a long breath, shook his head and then, with a resigned look—one that suggested having to finally speak of things better left unsaid—brought the bartender's face toward his, told him that he understood much more than Jansen thought. Wisnat explained that the darkness that hovered over him, had for the very first time lifted, that he could see clearly, as if the world had become transparent. He told Jansen that he had always been a good friend to him, that he appreciated it, but that all things drew toward an end. This, he explained, he must simply accept.

Finally, he told how there was something about Megan that Jansen did not yet comprehend, something he couldn't talk about, but that it made him feel necessary, almost
required.
Before Jansen could comment, before he could even open his mouth, Wisnat told him he need not worry himself over this. That he could be of no help in the matter. That such a thing could not be satisfied by one of his kind.

O
CTOBER 5 OF THE
subsequent year, Dennison Lee Wisnat and Megan Renee Thomas were pronounced man and wife. They flew out on a Thursday afternoon for Las Vegas, Nevada, and returned the following week. The gossip section of
The Perser Chronicle
mentioned that the two planned on taking as many trips as possible before raising a family. Jansen, reading the article several times before disposing of it, pondered the reporter's claim that this couple had a great deal in common. He could not, after some thought on the matter, help but agree.

He saw Wisnat very seldom over the next few years, but he would occasionally spy Megan on the street. The woman, it seemed, had undergone various changes: her skin much rougher than it used to be, almost leathern. Apparently, she spent her days in a tanning bed, wore makeup even more heavily than the last time Jansen had seen her at the bar. He would watch her go down the street, recede among the awnings and parking meters, unable to decide whether she looked happy or merely resigned.

Jansen could not pronounce judgment for he'd undergone a number of changes himself. That spring he put his bar up for sale and had little trouble getting rid of it. He felt, after all he'd been through, he needed time to recoup. But, although he altered his schedule and spent much of his time alone, he did not seem to be making progress toward recovery. He began taking long walks in which he would contemplate
the events of the preceding year, trying to determine at what point he'd gone wrong, what potholed, gravel road he'd steered down to find the bridge out and the way back filled with insuperable barricades. At first he took his strolls in the country but soon switched to the sidewalks of Perser, starting just around evening when the streets were abandoned and the businesses closed, continuing, sometimes, late into the night.

There were aspects of the situation he could never understand. Why, for instance, when Megan had begun growing facial hair she did not choose to treat the problem medically. He realized what a blow such a thing must have been to a person with an ego as frail as Megan's, but were there not cosmetic remedies that would have made her right again? He'd seen ads for epilators and hair removal creams, an assortment of products she might have tried before succumbing to the barber. Perhaps, he thought, she'd tried some of these. Perhaps the chemicals that removed hair were less effective than those that claimed to grow it.

There were other things about the circumstances that Jansen failed to comprehend, but his walks were helpful in this regard. They led him, in due time, past the barbershop, and one night he made a discovery that seemed to bring things sharply into focus. He returned the next week at the same hour, saw that
what he'd stumbled on was something akin to a ritual, and whether or not it was for the two who participated in it, it soon became so for Jansen: every Saturday and Wednesday for years to come.

Moving down the sidewalk just after ten, the street-lamps brightly lit, summer bugs or autumn leaves or winter flakes flitting about their bulbs, Jansen would come upon Main and follow it down to where Wisnat made his living, the same quaint shop with the plate-glass windows looking onto the street, the barber pole stationary now, the window shades drawn. There would be a warm yellow light coming from the edge of the blinds, and if one stood at just the right angle, one could make out what was happening inside without the slightest risk of being detected.

It was here that Jansen discovered what years of reflection had proven powerless to reveal. Here that he realized
gay
described his behavior better than most appellations. Here he understood that the love he bore Wisnat was inescapable, that suffering an existence of insult and desire was not the worst thing that could occur; that life, without love, without even the false hope of love, had very little left to it.

And now that he realizes this, is he better off for the knowledge? Has the epiphany fostered a clearer sense of self in this man who stands outside the barbershop with his face pressed against glass, watching past his blurred reflection, as he had from the
backseats of teenage cars, Wisnat—the barber's expression strangely ecstatic these days as he looks to the woman reclining in the chair below him, covered in a long sheet, perhaps even naked beneath it. The former bartender watches with a yearning that seems to match the barber's rapture, watches as the man takes foam from the dispenser and removes the washcloth from Megan's face, her skin warm and red, steaming slightly in the summer air. The foam goes onto her cheeks, Wisnat working it carefully in, and then the razor, just as careful, moving gently across her face—smiling, Jansen supposes, though he cannot tell this either. It feels wonderful, Jansen can remember, moving a little closer, closing his eyes to better imagine the sensation, the sound. It was the sound he had not forgotten, that which remained etched on his memory, a sound like something being scraped away, a noise he'd associated, at one time, with being cleansed, washed, as a child at the altar, of his sins. And though he cannot hear it through the glass, can hear nothing but the wind or swell of cicadas, he knows the sound as he knows the voice of the man who produces it. The crystalline noise of those smooth, clean, strokes. That scraping of the razor, like fingernails on glass.

An image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his maker? Behold, he put no trust in his servants, and his angels he charged with folly: how much less in them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is dust, which are crushed before the moth? They are destroyed from morning to evening: they perish for ever without regarding it. Doth not their excellency which is in them go away? They die, even without wisdom.

—
JOB
4:16 – 21

H
ER SURGEON HAD
explained this procedure would take five hours—one to make the incision and remove the lamina, another to extract the disk, three more to position the bone grafts, fasten the vertebrae with pins and screws. When Kathy began to awaken, struggle against the blur of vision and sound,
she saw white brilliance and a ring of figures brightly clothed, supposing, at the age of fifty-one, she'd expired on the operating table and ascended to her reward. Warmth overcame her and then elation, an assurance, as in those hymns she sang in church, that there was indeed a celestial paradise, and her voice, unparalleled in the congregations of Oklahoma, would attain its chosen place.