Mary Ann in Autumn (13 page)

Chapter 19
Refuge Once Removed

P
inyon City, she realized, had never been anything like a city. The highway and the main street were one and the same, and downtown, if you could call it that, consisted of a general store, a real estate office, a restaurant/saloon, and a derelict mini-mall that, according to a flaking sign, had been the “Sierra Meadow Wellness Center” in an earlier incarnation. The village was tiny, and virtually free of traffic, since two of the high-pass roads leading into it were closed during the winter. The one road in use—the one they’d just come down—was already velvety with snow. The whole effect was otherworldly.

Ben pulled the car off the road across from the general store.

“How’s that for parking karma?” he asked, grinning over the seat at Mary Ann.

She wasn’t sure what he meant until Michael climbed from the car and began unloading their bags from the hatchback. They had apparently parked directly in front of their accommodations—a matchbox of a bungalow, probably from the forties, encircled by a charmless aluminum fence. The sight of it sent Roman into fits of ecstasy.

“Just head on in,” Michael told her. “We’ll bring your stuff.”

“Won’t I need a key?”

“It should be open. They leave the key inside.”

So she led the way into the house, passing first through an unheated mudroom with a four-foot patchwork unicorn standing sentry at another door. Beyond that, she found the main room: a relentlessly plain but serviceable space painted a serviceable shade of cream. There was a battered upright piano, a large refectory table, and a cluster of kitschy but comfortable-looking eighties furniture. Someone had clearly anticipated their arrival, because an electric wall-heater was already droning away in the corner.

Roman shot past her into the room, touching base with other doors leading to other rooms—the bedrooms, presumably—as if systematically checking items off his arrival list. Mary Ann was charmed by his excitement, even found it a little contagious, until the dog stopped cold, hunched his back, and began heaving on the carpet.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “Did you get carsick?”

The dog had coughed up a few blades of grass (from his pit stop at the In-N-Out Burger, no doubt), so Mary Ann hurried off to the kitchen for a wad of paper towels. When she returned, Roman was standing uncharacteristically still in the middle of the room. A thick rope of slime, viscous as an egg white, was dangling from his shiny black lips. Hearing Mary Ann approach, he turned his head slowly and regarded her with blank-eyed bafflement, as if seeing a human being for the first time.

Then, suddenly, he dropped to the floor, his legs stiffening grotesquely in a series of spasms, his mouth foaming, his black marble eyes showing crescents of white.

“Oh, fuck . . . oh shit . . .” Mary Ann cried, just as the guys came staggering in with the luggage. “Something’s happened to him, Ben.”

Ben dropped his bags and rushed to kneel by the quivering dog. “It’s okay, Roman, we’re here. That’s a good boy. That’s a very good boy.” He looked up at Michael with the sober calm of a paramedic. “Is there anything in the fridge?”

“I doubt it. Unless maybe the last people . . . wait!” Michael scrambled out the front door and came back, seconds later, holding a clump of compacted snow in both hands. He dropped to the floor and pressed the snow against the base of the dog’s spine.

Roman was still shaking violently. “Hang on, Mr. Doodle, we’re almost there.”

Feeling useless, Mary Ann stayed out of the way as Ben and Michael cooed to the dog. When the spasms finally stopped, Roman just lay there panting. The dry air was spiked with the smells of bile and urine: the melting snow had formed a dark green continent on the light green carpet. Michael gazed up at her. “You should go to the bedroom. Close the door behind you.”

“If there’s anything I can do . . .” Roman began to snarl through clenched teeth.

“Go, Mary Ann! It’s Cujo time!”

This was all the shorthand she needed. She bolted for the nearest door and slammed it behind her, only to watch it spring open again as Ben and Michael joined her. The dog was barking like a fiend now, just beyond the door, knocking over lamps and end tables as it thrashed about the room in a seeming fury. “He’s blind right now,” Ben explained. “He knows that he lost it somehow, but he doesn’t know what’s happened.”

Neither did Mary Ann, of course.

“A grand mal seizure,” Michael explained. “He’s epileptic. This is called the postictal period. We have to stay away from him until it passes.”

She asked how long that might be.

Michael shrugged. “Hard to call. Whenever he calms down.”

Mary Ann felt wobbly, so she sank to the edge of the bed and tried to soothe herself with the thrift-shop art over the dresser: an incongruous tropical beach scene.

Seeing her rattled state, Ben sat next to her and took her hand.

“Welcome to Pinyon City, Mary Ann.”

T
EN MINUTES LATER, THE GUYS
left on an exploratory mission, closing the bedroom door behind them. She heard them speak softly to the dog for several minutes before Ben summoned her to join them. Roman was stretched out on the sofa now; Ben and Michael were sitting on the floor next to him. “It’s okay,” said Michael. “It’s over.”

The dog looked up as she approached, flapping his plumy tail against the sofa cushions in weary recognition. “Yeah,” said Ben. “There’s Mary Ann. She’s back.” He smiled at Mary Ann. “He always does that afterwards. He takes a head count.”

She was touched, somehow, to be one of the heads that Roman would count.

“Poor little boy,” she said, sitting on the floor next to Michael. She reached out and held one of the dog’s paws. The pads were enormous, the size of pennies, as dark as charcoal and almost as rough. His breath was foul, but she didn’t mind.

Michael stroked Roman’s side methodically, as if grooming a horse. “Look at him checking things out. He’s like Dorothy after the tornado. ‘I had the strangest dream, Auntie Em. And you were there . . . and you . . . and you.’ ”

Mary Ann smiled at her old friend. Was there still nothing in Michael’s life that couldn’t evoke a reference to
The Wizard of Oz
?

“How often does this happen?” she asked him.

“Only twice before. The last one was four months ago. We’ve got him on meds, but . . . maybe we’ll have to increase the dosage.” He cast a questioning glance at Ben.

“What causes it?” she asked.

“His is hereditary,” Ben answered. “His mother had an epileptic pup in an earlier litter.”

“Did you know that when you bought him?”

“No, but . . . really . . . what are you gonna do? He belonged to us the moment we picked him up. Didn’t you, Mr. Dood?” Ben looked down tenderly at the exhausted dog. Mary Ann thought she saw him get misty-eyed, but he shifted almost immediately to a breezier tone. “So what do you think, you gnarly beast? Is it time for a bath?”

Roman scrambled to his feet with the ungainly zeal of a newborn colt, that gross string of saliva still swinging from his lips, though this time it verged on the comical.

“I take it he likes baths,” she said.

“Oh, hell, yeah,” said Michael. “Anything to do with water. Wait’ll you see him in the snow. He’s a total fiend.”

As the guys led Roman to the bathtub, Mary Ann found herself envying the dog his blithe amnesia, the apparent ease with which he’d let go of something awful. He had endured a grand mal seizure—the perfectly named Big Bad—but the only thing on his mind now was the prospect of a warm bath and, maybe later, the pleasures of snow.

I used to be that,
she thought.

•••

S
HE WAS OFFERED HER CHOICE
of bedrooms, so she took the smaller one at the back of the house. It overlooked a meandering creek lined with chalet-style cabins. There was gray smoke curling from one of the chimneys and, somewhere farther down the valley, a dog barking erratically, but few other signs of habitation. She unzipped the duffel bag the guys had given her for the trip and arranged her things methodically on white plastic hangers in an otherwise empty closet. There wasn’t much to unpack; she was traveling even lighter now for this escape from her escape, this refuge once removed.

When she joined the guys again, they were in the kitchen loading groceries into a rusty old Buick of a refrigerator. (Ben had brought along several tote bags of leafy green vegetables, primordial-looking and streaked with red cartilage, like pterodactyl wings.) Roman was lapping water from a stainless steel bowl they’d also imported from the city.

“I’m making coffee,” said Ben. “Do you take cream?”

“If you have it,” she said.

“We don’t, actually. And we could use some mustard. Do you think you could make a run to the general store?”

It was such quaint thing to be asked—so absurdly
Little House on the Prairie
—that she smiled. “Across the road, you mean?”

“Do it,” said Michael. “It’s a trip.”

So she put on her borrowed ski jacket and headed through the swirling snow to the store. The few cars that were parked along the road, their own included—were already morphing into giant white tortoises; the only color remaining in the landscape was the blue-and-red glow of a Pepsi machine on the porch of the store.

She tugged open the door and entered a fetchingly decrepit scene: slanting floors, pegboards hung with fishing lures, a dormant potbellied stove serving as a perch for the resident cat. It might have been something out of Norman Rockwell if not for the glass-fronted freezers full of packaged pizzas and, mounted above the checkout counter, a flat-screen TV set on mute, with subtitled carnage from a car bombing in Iran.
Why would you want that here?
she wondered, until she saw the look of leaden boredom on the face of the young cashier. He was like some heartsick captive creature in a roadside zoo.

And apparently he’d been alone until her arrival.

“Wow,” she said, brushing the snow off her jacket. “It’s really starting to come down.”

“Don’t worry, lady. You’ll be able to get out. The plow comes through this evening.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I like the snow, actually.”

He grunted noncommittally.

“We’re staying across the road,” she added with growing discomfort. “That little rental house? It’s very sweet. This is such a charming town.”

Another grunt. “Anything in particular you’re lookin’ for?”

She shook her head. “I’d just like to browse, thanks.” She didn’t like this kid’s energy, and she didn’t like to be called “lady,” so she chose not to squander another moment in conversation. Still, to keep from looking like a fraud, she had to make a show of “browsing,” so she began meandering through that tilty-floored room, stopping to admire things that would never normally attract her attention. A box of jackknives, for example, and a creaky carousel of Day-Glo postcards emblazoned with flaming skulls.

Michael had been right; the place was a trip, a head-on collision of country funk and city demands. There was an alcove to one side, an obvious add-on to the original building, that did its best to impersonate a wine cellar, complete with an arbor of dusty plastic grapes. There was even an “antique nook”—a sad collection of cobalt medicine bottles and horseshoes—but she could smell mold from the door, so she didn’t go in.

She found the condiments on a scantily stocked shelf near the back of the store. There were two squeeze bottles of Grey Poupon, amazingly enough, so she took one, then headed toward the freezers for the half-and-half. The cashier was dealing with someone else now, laconically ringing up an order, so she lurked out of sight to avoid further awkward transactions. The funny thing was: she’d heard no one else enter the store. She had to assume this other customer had been shopping in the antique nook.

She waited for proof of the customer’s exit—the telltale jingle of the cowbells on the back of the front door—before bringing her items to the desk. She wondered how she’d become like this: afraid of everything and everyone, even herself. Cancer and infidelity were two good answers, except for the fact that her failure of nerve had come to her long before those particular calamities. Once, when she was younger, she would have stopped at nothing to charm this cashier—even
after
he’d been so rude to her—just to prove that, deep down, people were decent, and, even more important, that she was.

She no longer had the energy for that tiresome dance.

She paid for the items in cash without saying a word, mostly to see if the guy could complete the transaction in total silence. He did, and she wasn’t surprised. She stuffed the mustard and the half-and-half carton into the pockets of her jacket and left the building. It was already dusk, so she stopped on the porch to study the nondescript house across the street, her harbor for the next two nights. She could see someone moving about in the living room—Michael, it looked like—and there was light spilling from the windows onto the new-fallen snow. It felt like spying on someone else’s life.

It took her a while to notice the footprints leading from the store to the end of the block. There, next to the restaurant, she finally saw the other shopper, a slow-moving figure in a dark overcoat and a brimmed hat, hunching into the snow on his way home to somewhere. She could feel the bite of the wind now, so she tugged tight the hood of her jacket and proceeded to trudge toward the house. She was almost across the road when the all-but-soundless landscape was pierced by the hideous howl of an animal—a dog, she supposed, though, in these parts, according to Michael, it could just as easily be a coyote. They howled out of loneliness, apparently, and sometimes to celebrate a kill.

She turned in the direction of the howl, but there were no four-legged creatures in sight, only the anonymous person from the store. She stopped long enough to see that he had also been stopped in his tracks by the sound and was facing in her direction now. He was featureless at that distance, a solitary exclamation mark against the blank white page of the road, but she felt a certain primal kinship with him, this fellow traveler pricking his ears to an ominous call from the wild. Instinctively, she raised a gloved hand to mark their shared moment, as if to say:
Yes, stranger, I heard it, too.