Don't Make Me Stop Now (17 page)

“What I'm going to suggest is you get somebody to pick that car up for you, okay?” said Officer Britt. “I don't want you coming back over here, even to pick up your car.”

“Just take me home,” said Sanderson when they were out of her neighborhood.

“I thought you said you burned your house down.”

“You aren't going to arrest me for that?”

“Didn't kill nobody, did you?”

“No.”

“Collect any insurance?”

Sanderson hadn't gotten around to filing. It didn't seem right, collecting money off a statement made by bottomless and eternal love. As Officer Britt drove him farther and farther away from her, Sanderson kept busy thinking about all the terrible things in this world that he would never, ever do.

U
PSTAIRS
I
FOUND SMOKE
in the pockets of my daddy's striped shirts. Hovering in the mouths of his cowboy boots like steam coming off a cauldron. In my mama's top two drawers, smoke up under her fold-in-private things. Smoke in my nostrils, smoke curling round the coils of my ears.

Smoke from the broiling steak that way downstairs they were calling Chester drove me to raise my hand like I had a question and search the dark hall for the cord to the hideaway steps. Bare-bulb attic light turned boxes marked
CHRISTMAS, HATTERAS
, and
BRIC-A-BRAC: MANTELPIECE
a chicken-skin yellow. Chester smoke rose from them. I sat down on
HATTERAS
and hugged the stooped me that hid there for a half hour, bent up under the eave slope, straddling the attic ribs. Dogman, dogman calling to me for the first time in weeks.

I was careful not to breathe too hard lest insulation get
sucked up inside me. It happened before. Men came to insulate and I climbed up to watch them unroll the thick pink blankets like sleeping bags, me thinking, all right now, hide out from the craziness in the kitchen, camp out up under the eaves. A voice called me down out of the way and I obliged and this is when it happened, me standing at the foot of the ladder, my head flung back so far my mouth led straight to my belly. A stray tuft went right down me, disappeared inside.

Something like that, bring it back up, it cuts you twice, better just to live with it. It's possible to go on ahead, carrying such inconveniences; lots of people got holes in their hearts they don't even notice after a while. So after making noise about suing some company's ass off, which they shut him up by saying should I have been allowed to wag-tail down there like a table-scrap dog, my daddy made best-insulated-belly-in the-world jokes at me for a month, the length of his memory even if you were to shoot him. And I didn't even miss any school days, it happening in high summer, but that pink tuft I carry within.

Up rose the voice my mama uses when company comes, blue, curvy, beautiful to a fault. I waited until she'd quit calling to make my descent. Frontwards down the hinged ladder, Chester smoke thickening. Don't plunge or you'll get
the bends, I told myself while climbing down, and this self-administered advice tickled my insulated belly, allowing smiles for everyone when I entered the kitchen.

Where there was smoke from Chester mixed with Tareyton and pot smoke, where there was glass sparkle, plates chinking, King Crimson on the tape player. Some lady with Cleopatra bangs pasted to her forehead played the spoons, the men in the room watching her knit skirt surf a fishnetted knee. Daddy pulled a wide knife from the slotted block it took him six Saturdays to make, everybody bunched up to see Chester sliced. My mama and daddy continue to work their way through this world in the back of restaurants because they say it's the only type job where the laughter don't come in a can. Half of the restaurant help shows up at our house weekly to dispose of items they decide are overstock.

Greasy oven door banging down: Chester! George the sous-chef leaped toward the ceiling, jerked the beaded cord of the exhaust fan. As it cranked up, smoke shifted above our heads like flute-charmed cobras. Before I gave up Dogman I would have felt excitement in a situation similar, as if I was part of a group of older people just about to move off somewhere together. But that was before I gave up Dogman and at age fifteen and some change discovered what it is about groups of people.

— Cut the music down, called Daddy, grinding his knife in whetstone swirls I could tell he thought sexy.

— What exactly
is
Chester? A drunk woman asked this. I knew she was drunk because her words managed to sound lazy and exuberant at the same time.

— If you mean what cut, technically I believe Chester is a London broil. Somebody down in front said this without turning around, words passed overhead like bodies on stretchers.

Waving back the crowd with his hot mat mitt, Daddy pulled the oven rack out as far as it'd go, letting Chester bask and steam, laying him out for the group of them who'd named their dinner just to have an inside joke to get them through the deep drift of upcoming Tuesdays at work. Even Mama seemed moved as she stared at Chester who rose from the pan like a steep-sided island, greasy seas boiling at the bottom of his cliffs. Daddy, thumbing black plastic spatulas, shoveled Chester onto a cutting board and sliced so professional skinny you know he went to school for it. He's CIA, all the way up to Hyde Park, New York, to take his degree, though Mama, when she's pissed, calls his alma mater Culinary Institute of Alabama instead of America, says he don't know snail from doorstep slug.

Chester's carved sides curled into the bubbly sea. Every
thing went grainy then, everyone had Dick Tracy dotted faces, corduroyed foreheads. Dogman, Dogman, loud and clear. They started to line up with their plates to their breasts like grade school or prison and before the first slice slapped plate I was out the door and half down the hill, smoke from Chester pushing and pulling me.

M
Y COUSIN
M
ILLY'S
the one took me up there first. Dogman's always been so-so to her, take or leave, like cigs snuck in the bathroom during assembly. Though I have learned that people all the time take you to see things they don't themselves appreciate nor understand. Museums for one. They'll bus you over, snake you single file behind a teacher who's looking only a water fountain that works. What do you owe those who bring you to places that touch or change you? Don't owe them jack. They're only vehicles, saggy camels delivering you to the sphinx. Ride them until they're tongue-waggy, rub and chafe until their humps are threadbare as back-porch throw rugs, tweak their ears when you want down and when you dismount, don't you
even
look back.

Milly knows this herself. Boys kept bringing her up to where Dogman's supposed to roam, hoping she'd what? Fall willing under the spell of their clunky desires got up in man-dog costume and sent to prowl the ridges? Dogman the
local Loch Ness monster, rivaled around here only by the Baby Bridge and the irrigation pond they raked for Floyd Japarks's bloated corpse. Dogman standing in for the moonlit lane, the two Miller Lites, the skinny-dip, anything designed to introduce the friction. Dogman-as-aphrodisiac? It's like thinking old Darwin's seductive, which in a way his stuff sort of is, not that these boys would know Darwin's stuff if it chased them down and bit them.

Driving up to see Dog that first time, Milly leans into her big idea boy, away from the door and the sidewalks just beyond, like the car's hugging a constant curve. She wants to ask where he's taking her but don't. She's heard talk of Dogman and wants to be a witness but yet you can't come out and ask, you got to come up on him.

Dogman'll run from you as he lives and breathes.

Milly wants to say she's seen him, but the boys taking her up there don't have foremost in their minds the tracking down of Dogman. You have to know where to park and all. You got to learn to follow clotheslines through the head-high dark as if they were flashlight beams frozen for you. There's a sixth-sense semaphore out there, a complicated taking into account of things: crosstown sirens bouncing like hailstones off the sides of barns and train whistles shaking trees. One short and two long caterpillars underfoot. Smell the crunched grass
not yet sprung back up. It's a question of putting yourself out there by turning yourself inside out, which most would not want to do even if they knew how.

One night Milly claims to see something. They're rounding the switchback on one of those logging roads that fork off Japarks Drive and come up on something standing there in the muddy crook. Moonlight strikes the puddle he straddles. Milly's fuzzed on details because she says the light loses out to the clouds as they watch, but when I doubt her to her face she comes up with something: drawn-up paw, cheek dribble, dangling tongue, drool-coated fang agleam. She describes
at
it, conjuring things I would have said myself if you asked me back then what he looked like.

She's back up there lots with that same boy, but when they go for a good month or two without a sighting she exchanges him for a few more. Sometimes she claims to see Dog for a second or two but always when he's running away or behind a tree. Like I said, it's to Milly like shoplifting Sucrets or sneaking into the drive-in. She doesn't
need
it. Soon as she gets her license, Uncle Houston gives her that castoff Astro to drive, Mill loads the front seat with her big-haired girlfriends and goes looking Dog like four nights a week. Suddenly above using love to get up that hill. Love changes shape when you pass your driving test and get given a car, even an Astro the
greenish of bad teeth. For some, this is independence: a half ton of sprung seat and dangly rearview, life course sighted by a hood ornament. I might could feel this way myself had not Milly told me about Dogman, had I not been born knowing what's a vehicle and what teaches you things.

But maybe I was born not knowing squat, just like the rest of the world. Maybe I was nothing special until that moment I stood gawking up at black-attic heaven and received from on high a piece of glass disguised as county fair cotton candy. Had I stood a little to the left or shut my trap I would have grown up to be like my parents or Milly. Instead I carry within O pink hurt everlasting. I breathe, I bleed: invisible harm done with every doggy-dog pant.

Overstock rum from the restaurant flooded a weekend way back when. Seems like forever ago, but it was after Milly got her license, which she's only had them six months so it must have been spring. Milly came by the house that Saturday. Overstock oysters roasted in foot tubs; there must have been twenty people from the restaurant, which led me to wonder was it even open or had they called an overstock strike. Me and Milly sneaking sweet rum punch and eavesdropping: heard one man say about his wife smack in front of her that all she ever did in this world was sit around and wait for books to come out in paperback, which Milly thought was funny but which got away with me so bad I begged Milly to go to ride.
Which she agreed to only if I'd hunker down when she got whistled at, which I agreed to.

Wasn't much whistling, wasn't much hunkering. Mill took back roads through that neighborhood called Stairstep, where houses hang half off the ridge like they've been left there by high water. I could have got offended — Mill not wanting to be seen with me — but the main thing was we get up there and find Dogman.

We wound up Japarks, too fast past the unfinished church, skimpy tithing having left the roof a patchwork of shingle and tin. I used to ride up there on my bike when I was little and the church was an ancient ruin to me then, back in my junior archeologist period when all I wanted to do was dig up buried cities, cannonballs, dinosaur bones. What cured me finally was a program on public tube which told how these archeologists dig for years sometimes and don't uncover much but a broken vase. Vase the narrator pronounced in the snooty-ass British manner — vozz — which, hell, I guess I would call it that too if it took me a year to dig one up.

— I wonder what do they call that style of architecture, said Milly, inclining her whole body toward the church.

— Run out of money, I said.

— That particular style you just mentioned could describe this entire town.

Milly's all-of-a-sudden prissy diction made me picture her
marrying a recruit in a few years time just to escape from our town. One day on base she'd blink awake on her dribbly pillow to stare at pink scalp beneath crew-cut stubble, hair running in feathery arrows like bones of filleted flounder and Milly hating fish. But I could not stop and feel sorry for her. Not when we were on our way up to see Dogman.

— Slow damn down some.

She sped up until we passed a car she thought she knew. She whistled, I hunkered. From the floorboard I watched Mill's foot hesitate in a float between brake and gas before she decided she couldn't be seen with me and heeled the gas. I came out of my crouch. It's all vanity. On a personal quest, what do you care if someone spots you with your weird little cousin? Vanity or vengeance one, I decided, thinking of Mama and Daddy and how they thought they were getting over with their overstock parties, how many ways they'd found to make those binges sound rightfully theirs: food going to waste, low wage and long hour, customers getting gouged. That last one I loved best, them taking pity on the poor customers not while at work but at home and only when there's a makeshift holding tank, Daddy's beat blue pier-fishing cooler, full of lobsters for them to tong at and name crazy names. In my head I started writing a song called “People Got Their Wrong Wrong Reasons,” which Milly interrupted the very first stanza of.

— We ain't going to see him tonight.

— And why aren't we?

— Too damn dark, she said, tossing her tongues-of-flame-licking-headrest hair.

But we did see him, or I did, no thanks to Milly, who did everything she could to drive him away. I had to reach over and crank the car off so we could coast up the logging trail at the end of Japarks. The Astro rocked to a stop in a little lake swallowing the trail. To reach land we had to do splits. Milly kept up a bitchy stream I wagered my parents could hear over the Apache war cry album they loved to throw on around this time of the evening. It was
bad
dark out, limbs-clawing-you-before-you-even-know-you're-up-on-them dark, Milly shadowing me after those first wet steps through the backhoe-tread puddles. Plainly she was a vehicle; the camel had kneeled.