Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (20 page)

Until Guinea was there. Against him. Hurtling up to be held. And Matley took her, did hold her. He stroked her long guinea hair, whispering, good girl, Guinea. Good.

Matley stood in the midst of the slaughter, shaking and panting, palming little Guinea's head. Most of the beat dogs had slunk off a
ways to wait, but the bolder ones were already sneaking back. And finally Matley slowed enough, he was spent enough, to squint again through the dim and gradual understand.

There were no collars there.

Slowly.

These colors of fur, these shapes and sizes of bones. Were not dogs. No.

Groundhogs, squirrels, possums, deer.

Then he felt something and turned and saw: Johnby crouched in the dead grass, rifle stock stabbed in the ground and the barrel grooving his cheek. Johnby was watching.

SOMEHOW IT GOT
going around in town that it had been a pile of dead dogs, and some said it served Muttie right, that many dogs should be illegal anyway. But others felt sad. Still other people had heard it was just a bunch of dead animals that ole Johnby had collected, lord knows if he'd even shot them, was the gun loaded? His family said not; could have been roadkill. Then there were the poison believers, claimed it was wild animals and dogs both, poisoned by the retirees in Oaken Acre Estates, and Bill Bates swore his brother-in-law'd been hired by the imports to gather a mess of carcasses and burn em up in a brush pile, he just hadn't got to the fire yet. Mr. Puffinburger held his ground, he felt vindicated, at least to himself, because this here was the lengths to which those train people would go, this here was how far they'd alter the landscape to suit themselves. What no one was ever certain about was just how many'd been lost. Were they all gone? had any come back? was he finding new ones? how many were out there now? Fred at the feed store reported that Muttie wasn't buying any dog food, but the UPS truck had spied him along a creek bed with a dog galloping to him in some hillbilly Lassie-come-home.

Despite all the rumors, it must be said that after that, they didn't talk about Dog Man much anymore. Even for the skeptics and the critics, the subject of Matley lost its fun. And they still saw Muttie, although he came into town less often now, and when they did see him, they looked more closely, and a few even sidled up to him in the store in case he would speak. But the dogless Matley, to all appearances, was exactly like the dogful one.

THESE DAYS, SOME
mornings, in the lost-dog aftermath, Matley wakes in his camper having forgot the place, the year, his age. He's always had such spells occasionally, losses of space and time, but now it's more than ever. Even though when he was a kid, Mom Revie'd only allow one live dog at a time and never inside, they did have for some years a real dog named Blanchey, some kind of wiener-beagle mix. And now, these mornings, when Matley wakes, believing himself eight in the flood-gone house, he hears Mom Revie's dog-calling song.

Oh, the way that woman could call a dog, it was bluegrass operatic. “Heeeeeere, Blanchey! Heeeeeeere, Blanchey, Blanchey, Blanchey,” she'd yodel off the back porch, the “here” pulled taut to eight solid seconds, the “Blanchey” a squeaky two-beat yip. Then “You, Blanchey! C'mere, girl! 'mon!” fall from high-octave “here's” to a businesslike burr, and when Blanchey'd still not come, Revie'd switch from cajole to command. “Yah, Blanchey, Yah! Yah! Yah! Yah!” a belly-deep bass; while the “here's” seduced, the “yah's” insist, oh, it plunged down your ear and shivered your blood, ole Mom Revie's dog-calling song. And for some minutes, Matley lets himself hover in that time, he just lies abed and pleasures in the tones. Until she cuts loose in frustration with a two-string riff—“comeoutcomeoutcomeoutcomeout”—rapid banjo plinkplunk wild, and Matley wakes enough to know ain't no dogs coming. To remember all the dogs are gone but one.

He crawls out of the bunk and hobbles outside. Guinea pokes her head from his pocket, doesn't like what she sniffs, pulls back in. It is March, the train season is long over, but Matley hears it anyway. Hears it coming closer, moaning and sagging like it's about to split. Hears the haunty music that train plays, haunty like a tawdry carnival ride. Train moving slow and overfull, passing the joints in the rails, beat beat, and the
scree
sound over the railbeat, he hears it shriek-squeal over steel. And Matley stands there between househole and Winnebago, the morning without fog and the air like glass, and he understands he is blighted landscape. He is disruption of scenery. Understands he is the last one left, and nothing but a sight. A sight. Sight, wheel on rail click it on home, Sight. Sight. Sight. Then Matley does not hear a thing.

COOP

T
HEY BUNKED IN
old chicken houses jammed with older iron beds, lumpy-ticked, stained, summers and summers of homesick child urine, then the rat and the swallow dirt all empty winter. The beds pressed so tight the girls who brought suitcases had to sleep with them, so tight Carly could shift an elbow and touch the girl beside her. Feel the girl's night breath on her own cheek. Carly held her pee as long as she could before she dared the dark walk down the splintery floor past forty-three sleepers and their forty-three dreams. After, kneeling on her bed, she peered at the cousins from Honeyvine heaped alongside her. Found the face of the littlest one and wondered again about what the bigger ones said.

The camp was six miles off the highway down a dirt road, an old farm donated to the county by a dead bachelor. School buses carried them there, the road so narrow, the woods so close, in places leaves crushed against the windows. It was a free camp for girls, with sweaty surplus cheese in the dining hall and gallon tins of peanuts. The milk always this side of turning, and the raisins. Some girls brought their things in plastic bags, and some brought nothing at all, and behind the ruined piano on the dining hall porch were piled big garbage bags of donated clothes. The littlest Honeyvine found an ankle-length football
jersey she wore like a gown until it tripped her in a kickball game, pitching her on her face. Carly watched her struggling there. Live thing in a sack. And a girl named Izzie came every year, a retarded kid with a finger missing, hard to tell if it was the second or third. She'd lie with her head at the foot of the bed and seize through the bars at the little girls passing. And if she was mad at somebody, which she generally was, she'd throw that stump like a middle finger. Only the finger wasn't there.

Community Action had a hard time recruiting counselors, but for the three years Carly had come, they'd always got Debbie and Royal. Both had been campers themselves at one time, and Debbie was the darker, her skin pillowy, Carly saw, calling you to touch it. Like it needed your finger pressed into it. But then, underneath, Carly understood, a hardness harder than bone. Royal was leaner, lighter, a high fine freckled, berries or seeds, her beauty more boy than Deb's beauty was. They were a kind of girl Carly had never seen outside of camp, you felt it the second they stepped off the bus, and you could not help but watch them. Carly watched.

Mrs. Junkins, the camp director who was often tired, always called Debbie and Royal her right-hand women. Mrs. Junkins, with her plum-mottled calves under floppy dresses, and how the hug-thirsty little ones would climb all over her, poking in her pockets, palming her cheeks. How the older ones would have to remind her about the next thing on the schedule. That year, though, Mrs. Junkins didn't come.
Died
, the older girls whispered. Just plain wore out, said the cook. Instead, they brought in a woman called Dr. Maxine from someplace else, Carly heard that right away in her voice. And the second thing Carly noticed was how she smiled, tight, all the time over nothing. Like she knew something to smile about none of them ever would.

That year, Carly wasn't in Debbie and Royal's bunkhouse. Her coop's counselors were 4-H volunteers, motherly, placid. She landed
in a bed beside that bunch from up in Honeyvine, their first time at camp, and sisters or cousins they all claimed to be. They pushed their beds even closer and puppy-slept in a pile. They admitted they had no running water in their Honeyvine houses, and right away, they showered every chance they got, their hair all the time wet and the parts in it crooked. Them streaming naked, two, three, at a time in those slimy concrete stalls, and it was there Carly saw, the first afternoon, how the littlest had a caved place in her chest. Like someone had struck a rock to her wishbone.

“Her,” one of the older Honeyvines said when she caught Carly looking, “she'll leave every night.”

Carly looked back into the Honeyvine's glasses. Saw two of her own face. The campers were forbidden to cross the bunkhouse stoop after lights out.

“She won't use the door,” the Honeyvine said.

Carly stretched her borrowed garment bag along the edge of her mattress. She slept with the bag between her and them.

Turned out Dr. Maxine was not just a doctor, but a lifeguard, too, and all day long she wore a little robe over a strange bathing suit of jagged colors, her navy-veined thighs something any woman Carly'd ever known would have scrambled to cover up. When Debbie and Royal started to lead the songs at assembly, Dr. Maxine motioned them back to their seats with a smile and led the songs herself, swaying at her knees and strumming a guitar, her voice a high pinch in her nose. After crafts, Dr. Maxine asked all the girls to stay at the long tables, and then she passed out multiple-choice questions and number two pencils.
This
, she promised,
is not a test
. When I grow up, I want to A, B, C, D. The number of people who live in my house is A, B, C, D.
There are no right answers
, Dr. Maxine assured. While they filled ovals, Dr. Maxine strode around behind them and patted girls' shoulders with a
stiff hand. She lifted a strand of Izzie's hair. Carly watched Izzie's eyes flare, her neck stiffen. But Izzie kept her stump in her fist.

The harder it was to like Dr. Maxine, the harder Carly watched Debbie and Royal. Royal's sharp white hair, prickly even in its length, and the tight bow of her back when she bent down to pull socks over long leg muscles. Debbie's tough quieter, it turned in while Royal's turned out, and how little she smiled. How little she ever smiled, so when she did smile at you. When she did. The tough girls Carly had seen outside of camp were a scrabbling, desperate, seedy tough, a tough that made you shamed or scared. This tough made you want to be. And everybody watched them. The little girls scribbling notes on the backs of mimeographed sheets they stole from Vespers, True Friends Always and check the box, will you be my best? The fourteen-year-olds, after lights out, whispering, and the middle girls, like Carly, shy and achy, changing their underwear under the covers. They watched.

It was swimming they all looked forward to the most, the release into cool and clean blue water, and at first, even Dr. Maxine on her lifeguard throne could not dampen the escape. Girls burst squealing through the gate, the bravest cannonballing off the sides, while the ones who couldn't swim, like Carly, dropped into the shallow end, flung open their arms and pretended, then saved themselves with their feet. Carly stood still a minute, chin lifted, and scanned the deep end, where Royal's body shimmer-ran through water. Carly's eyes following, her heart knocking, sun flash skin, water, skin, water, which? moving. That's, Carly thought, why they call her Royal.

Then Royal hauled herself up the ladder, calling over her shoulder to Debbie, a dark head only. Carly hung on the shallow-end side, watching through splash and spray. Royal doubled on herself on the ladder, halter top to knees, water sluicing off the arc of her back. Royal
climbed out, pounded her cocked head to drive water out her ear, and sauntered towards the shallow end. The nonswimmers shrieked.

Royal dropped into the middle of them, while the small ones reached, famished for touch, and Royal picked a couple up, then chose a tiny one and lifted her lengthwise in water. Royal steadied her, one hand on her back and the other hand underneath, Royal slid her, balanced her, the others hollering, look, look, you can swim, my turn! my turn! Then the second chosen one, lifted, the small of her back, her stomach, her swimming between Royal's two big hands.

Carly, too old to be picked, felt someone else watching Royal. Carly swung her head. Dr. Maxine in the lifeguard chair, her whistle squeezed between her fingers, fingers poised between her breasts. Then the littlest Honeyvine was right there. Shivering on the pool edge, her feet almost on Carly's hands, water streaming down to make a puddle like a shadow at her feet. Her bathing suit drooped around her rock-struck ribs, the tiny nipples peeking out. She left every night, they all said it. She didn't use windows, didn't use doors. Carly pushed off to run away through water, the weight of it against her a quicksand dream.

That was Wednesday. Soon the black girls from Piedmont were calling Dr. Maxine Mrs. Reagan because of all the speeches she made. Although she'd said she was a doctor, when Rhonda Funkhouser sprained her ankle, it was the cook had to wrap it. That night at campfire, a puny nick in the heavy heavy woods, Dr. Maxine and her guitar led the songs again, Izzie howling the refrains, while Royal sat on the front bleacher with a stick in her hand, drilling the end into ground. “Amazing Grace” and “Almost Heaven,” and what did Dr. Maxine know of Jesus and West Virginia? Debbie crouched a few girls away from Carly where Carly could see only the waves of her hair. Carly had overheard the older girls before Vespers, something about Dr. Maxine and Royal and the pool, and the darkness rose behind Carly like a
hood. After the fire, the campers walked in scattered clumps back to the coops, the Honeyvines moving in a huddle under a shared blanket, Carly at their edge, near enough but far enough. Overhead, ridges drew closer together.
You don't touch them there
. That's what the big girls had whispered Dr. Maxine said.