Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (17 page)

HE'D HEARD WHAT
they said down in town, how he had seventy-five dogs back in there, but they did not know. Dog Man, they called him. Beagle Boy. Muttie. Mr. Hound. A few called him Cat. Stayed in a Winnebago camper beside a househole that had been his family home-place before it was carried off in the '85 flood, an identical Winnebago behind the lived-in one so he could take from the second one parts and pieces as they broke in the first, him economical, savvy, keen, no, Matley was not dumb. He lived off a check he got for something nobody knew what, the youngest of four boys fathered by an old landowner back in farm times, and the other three left out and sold off their inheritance in nibbles and crumbs, acre, lot, gate, and tree, leaving only Matley anchored in there with the dogs and the househole along the tracks. Where a tourist train passed four times a day on summer weekends and even more days a week during leaf colors in fall, the cars bellied full of outsiders come to see the mountain sights—“farm children playing in the fields,” the brochure said, “a land that time forgot”—and there sits Matley on a lawn chair between Winnebagos and househole. He knew what they said in town, the only person they talked about near as often as Matley was ole Johnby, and Johnby they discussed only half as much. They said Mr. Hound had seventy-five dogs back in there,
nobody had ever seen anything like it, half of them living outside in barrels, the other half right there in the camper with him. It was surely a health hazard, but what could you do about it? That's what they said.

But Matley never had seventy-five dogs. Before they started disappearing, he had twenty-two, and only six he kept in the camper, and one of those six was Guinea, who fit in his sweatshirt pocket, so didn't hardly count. And he looked after them well, wasn't like that one woman kept six Pomeranians in a Jayco pop-up while she stayed in her house and they all got burned up in a camper fire. Space heater. The outside dogs he built shelters for, terraced the houses up the side of the hill, and, yes, some of them were barrels on their sides braced with two-by-four struts, but others he fashioned out of scrap lumber, plenty of that on the place, and depending on what mood took him, sometimes he'd build them square and sometimes he'd build them like those lean-to teepees where people keep fighting cocks. Some dogs, like Parchy, slept in cut-out cable spools, a cable spool was the only structure in which Parchy would sleep, Matley could find cable spools and other almost doghouses along the river after the spring floods. And he never had seventy-five dogs.

Parchy, Buck, Missy, Randolph, Ghostdog, Blackie, Ed. Those went first. That left Tick, Hickory, Cese, Muddy Gut, Carmel, Big Girl, Leesburg, Honey, Smartie, Ray Junior, Junior Junior, Louise, Fella, Meredith, and Guinea. Junior Junior was only a pup at the time, Smartie was just a part-time dog, stayed two or three nights a week across the river with his Rottweiler girlfriend, and Meredith was pregnant. Guinea goes at the end of the list because Guinea was barely dog at all.

THEY COULD TELL
you in town that Matley was born old, born with the past squeezing on him, and he was supposed to grow up in that? How? There was no place to go but backwards. His parents were old by the
time he came, his brothers gone by the time he could remember, his father dead by the time he was eight. Then the flood, on his twenty-third birthday. In town they might spot Matley in his '86 Chevette loaded from floorboards to dome light with twenty-five pound bags of Joy Dog food, and one ole boy would say, “Well, there he goes. That ruint runt of Revie's four boys. End piece didn't come right.”

Another: “I heard he was kinda retarded.”

“No, not retarded exactly . . . but he wasn't born until Revie was close to fifty. And that explains a few things. Far as I'm concerned. Old egg, old sperm, old baby.”

“Hell, weren't none of them right,” observes a third.

“There's something about those hills back in there. You know Johnby's from up there, too.”

“Well,” says the last. “People are different.”

Matley. His ageless, colorless, changeless self. Dressed always in baggy river-colored pants and a selection of pocketed sweatshirts he collected at yard sales. His bill-busted, sweat-mapped, river-colored cap, and the face between sweatshirt and cap as common and unmemorable as the pattern on a sofa. Matley had to have such a face, given what went on under and behind it. The bland face, the constant clothes, they had to balance out what rode behind them, or Matley might be so loose as to fall. Because Matley had inherited from his parents not just the oldness, and not just the past (that gaping loss), and not just the irrational stick to the land, even land that you hated, and not just scraps of the land itself, and the collapsed buildings, and the househole, but also the loose part, he knew. Worst of all, he'd inherited the loose part inside (you got to hold on tight).

NOW IT WAS
a couple years before the dogs started disappearing that things had gotten interesting from the point of view of them in town.
They told. Matley's brother Charles sold off yet another plat on the ridge above the househole, there on what had always been called High Boy until the developers got to it, renamed it Oaken Acre Estates, and the out-of-staters who moved in there started complaining about the barking and the odor, and then the story got even better. One of Dog Man's Beagle Boy's Cat's mixed-breed who-knows-what's got up in there and impregnated some purebred something-or-other one of the imports owned, “and I heard they had ever last one of them pups put to sleep. That's the kind of people they are, now,” taking Matley's side for once. Insider versus outsider, even Muttie didn't look too bad that way.

Matley knew. At first those pureblood-dog old people on High Boy appeared only on an occasional weekend, but then they returned to live there all the time, which was when the trouble started. They sent down a delegation of two women one summer, and when that didn't work, they sent two men. Matley could tell they were away from here from a distance, could tell from how they carried themselves before they even got close and confirmed it with their clothes. “This county has no leash ordinance,” he told that second bunch because by that time he had checked, learned the lingo, but they went on to tell him how they'd paid money to mate this pureblood dog of some type Matley'd never heard of to another of its kind, but a mongrel got to her before the stud, and they were blaming it on one of his. Said it wasn't the first time, either. “How many unneutered dogs do you have down here?” they asked, and, well, Matley never could stand to have them cut. So. But it wasn't until a whole year after the encounter that his dogs started disappearing, and Matley, of course, had been raised to respect the old.

The calendar was a free one from Berger's Funeral Home, kind of calendar has just one picture to cover all the months, usually a picture
of a blonde child in a nightgown praying beside a bed, and this calendar had that picture, too. Blonde curls praying over lost dog marks, Matley almost made them crosses, but he changed them to question marks, and he kept every calendar page he tore off. He kept track, and for each one, he carried a half eulogy, half epitaph in his head:

Ed. Kind of dog you looked at and knew he was a boy, didn't have to glimpse his privates. You knew from the jog-prance of those stumpy legs, cock-of-the-walk strut, all the time swinging his head from side to side so not to miss anything, tongue flopping out and a big grin in his eyes. Essence of little boy, he was, core, heart, whatever you want to call it. There it sat in a dog. Ed would try anything once and had to get hurt pretty bad before he'd give up, and he'd eat anything twice. That one time, cold night, Matley let him in the camper, and Ed gagged and puked up a deer liver on Matley's carpet remnant, the liver intact, though a little rotty. There it came. Out. Ed's equipment was hung too close to the ground, that's how Mr. Mitchell explained it, “his dick's hung too close to the ground, way it almost scrapes stuff, would make you crazy or stupid, and he's stupid,” Mr. Mitchell'd say. Ed went on August 10.

Ghostdog. The most mysterious of the lot, even more so than Guinea, Ghostdog never made a sound; not a whimper, not a grunt, not a snore. A whitish ripple, Ghostdog was steam moving in skin, the way she'd ghost-coast around the place, a glow-in-the-dark angel cast to her, so that to sit by the househole of a summer night and watch that dog move across the field, a luminous padding, it was to learn how a nocturnal animal sees. Ghostdog'd give Matley that vision, she would make him understand, raccoon eyes, cat eyes, deer. And not only did Ghostdog show Matley night sight, through Ghostdog he could see also smells. He learned to see the shape of a smell, watching her with her head tilted, an odor entering nostrils on breeze, he could see the smell shape, “shape” being the only word he had for how the odors
were, but “shape” not it at all. Still. She showed him. Ghostdog went on August 19.

Blackie was the only one who ever came home. He returned a strange and horrid sick, raspy purr to his breath like a locust. Kept crawling places to die, but Matley, for a while, just couldn't let him go, even though he knew it was terribly selfish. Blackie'd crawl in a place, and Matley'd pull him back out, gentle, until Matley finally fell asleep despite himself, which gave Blackie time to get under the bed and pass on. September 2. But Blackie was the only one who came home like that. The others just went away.

BEFORE MOM REVIE
died, he could only keep one dog at a time. She was too cheap to feed more, and she wouldn't let a dog inside the house until the late 1970s; she was country people, and that was how they did their dogs, left them outside like pigs or sheep. For many years, Matley made do with his collection, dogs of ceramic and pewter, plastic and fake fur, and when he was little, Revie's rules didn't matter so much, because if he shone on the little dogs his heart and mind, Matley made them live. Then he grew up and couldn't do that anymore.

When he first started collecting live dogs after Mom Revie was gone, he got them out of the paper, and if pickings there were slim, he drove around and scooped up strays. Pretty soon, people caught on, and he didn't have to go anywhere for them; folks just started dumping unwanteds along the road above his place. Not usually pups, no, they were mostly dogs who'd hit that ornery stage between cooey-cute puppyhood and mellow you-don't-have-to-pay-them-much-mind adult. That in-between stage was the dumping stage. The only humans Matley talked to much were the Mitchells, and more than once, before the dogs started disappearing, Mrs. Mitchell to Matley would gentle say, “Now, you know, Matley, I like dogs myself. But I never did want
to have more than two or three at a time.” And Matley, maybe him sitting across the table from her with a cup of instant coffee, maybe them in the yard down at his place with a couple of dogs nosing her legs, a couple peeing on her tires, Matley'd nod, he'd hear the question in what she said, but he does not, could not, never out loud say . . .

How he was always a little loose inside, but looser always in the nights. The daylight makes it scurry down, but come darkness, nothing tamps it, you never know (hold on tight). So even before Matley lost a single dog, many nights he'd wake, not out of nightmare, but worse. Out of nothing. Matley would wake, a hard sock in his chest, his lungs aflutter, his body not knowing where it was, it not knowing, and Matley's eyes'd ball open in the dark, and behind the eyes: a galaxy of empty. Matley would gasp.
Why be alive?
This was what it told him.
Why be alive?

There Matley would lie in peril. The loose part in him. Matley opened to emptiness, that bottomless gasp. Matley falling, Matley down-swirling (you got to hold), Matley understanding how the loose part had give, and if he wasn't to drop all the way out, he'd have to find something to hold on tight (yeah boy. Tight. Tight. Tighty tight tight.). Matley on the all-out plummet, Matley tumbling head over butt down, Matley going almost gone, his arms outspread, him reaching, flailing, whopping. . . . Until, finally. Matley hits dog. Matley's arms drop over the bunk side and hit dog. And right there Matley stops, he grabs hold, and Matley . . . stroke. Stroke, stroke. There, Matley. There.

Yeah, the loose part Matley held with dog. He packed the emptiness with pup. Took comfort in their scents, nose-buried in their coats, he inhaled their different smells, corn chips, chicken stock, meekish skunk. He'd listen to their breathing, march his breath in step with theirs, he'd hear them live, alive, their sleeping songs, them lapping themselves and recurling themselves, snoring and dreaming, settle and
sigh. The dogs a soft putty, the loose part, sticking. There, Matley. There. He'd stroke their stomachs, finger-comb their flanks, knead their chests, Matley would hold on, and finally he'd get to the only true pleasure he'd ever known that wasn't also a sin. Rubbing the deep velvet of a dog's underthroat.

BY LATE AUGUST
, Matley had broke down and paid for ads in the paper, and he got calls, most of the calls people trying to give him dogs they wanted to get rid of, but some people thinking they'd found dogs he'd lost. Matley'd get in his car and run out to wherever the caller said the dog was, but it was never his dog. And, yeah, he had his local suspicions, but soft old people like the ones on the ridge, it was hard to believe they'd do such a thing. So first he just ran the road. Matley beetling his rain-colored Chevette up and down the twelve-mile-long road that connected the highway and his once-was farm. Holding the wheels to the road entirely through habit, wasn't no sight to it, sight he couldn't spare, Matley squinting into trees, fields, brush, until he'd enter the realm of dog mirage. Every rock, dirt mound, deer, piece of trash, he'd see it at first and think “Dog!” his heart bulging big with the hope. Crushed like an egg when he recognized the mistake. And all the while, the little dog haunts scampered the corners of his eyes, dissolving as soon as he turned to see. Every now and then he'd slam out and yell, try Revie's different calling songs, call, “Here, Ghostdog, here! Come, girl, come!” Call, “Yah, Ed, yah! Yah! Yah! Yah!” Whistle and clap, cluck and whoop. But the only live thing he'd see besides groundhogs and deer was that ole boy Johnby, hulking along.