Taking Care (8 page)

Jim said, “It’s always bad on opening day. It won’t be like this again. The boys get bored or discouraged and the hunting slacks off, you’ll see.”

Beyond the trees, the river smoked. “I don’t care,” she shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. I never go outside.” The woods had no power and made no sense. One could always cut everything down.

Of course, Jim had told her the truth. In the days that followed there were only scattered shots early in the morning and then a silence so intense that Lola felt she would never recover from it, not even in Atlanta.

Early in December, she began boxing dishes and cleaning out drawers, trying to throw away as much as possible. She wanted to abandon everything that had had anything to do with their life in the trailer but she knew that this was preposterous and that they couldn’t afford it. She gathered up an armload of clothes and plates and paperback books and, opening the door with her elbow, stepped out onto the deck. Parked in front of her was a red, sprung pickup truck with a large wooden box in the back for dogs. The box was unlatched and
there wasn’t anything inside except some dirty straw and a plastic dish. Two boys were sitting on the hood of the truck with their backs to Lola, and when they heard the noise behind them, they jumped to the ground and faced her, crouching, with long grins that turned instantly into disappointed frowns. Their faces then gyrated wildly before collectively settling into detached somnolence. One boy rubbed at his eyelid as though he were shining up an apple. “Yo,” he said, nodding to Lola. He was bony, with thin dirty hands and close-cropped tan hair that clung to his head like a cap made out of a pecan shell.

Lola’s mouth was cold, as though she had been chewing ice. She kept raising her chin as she moved her tongue around in her mouth, until her head was tipped back so far she could barely see them.

The one that had spoken first said, “Name of Cale Barfield. This here,” he flapped his hand at his companion, “J.J. Leape.”

J. J. stamped his boots on the ground and moved his head up and down curtly as though he were afraid someone was going to see him do it. He wore a Navy flight jacket and had incredibly clear blue eyes, like a baby’s.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Lola said. “I couldn’t care less who you are, but I certainly would like to know what you’re doing here.”

“We lost our dawgs,” Cale said serenely, pulling himself back up on the hood of the truck. “Three. One blue,” he spread his hand before his face and waggled a finger. “One black ’n’ tan and one dawg.”

“I couldn’t care less what you are doing here,” Lola said and then stopped, confused. She still had her arms full of trash and she pressed it closer to her chest. “You’ve got to leave.” Her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere behind her.

“We didn’t know no one was here. We thought hit a summer camp all closed up. Curtains all closed up. Nothing here. No cars or gear nor nothing. Looks closed to me, don’t hit to you, J.J.?”

The boy with the blue eyes slammed the door of the cab shut and sat down on the running board. Hanging in the rear window
were two rifles and a shotgun. J.J.’s eyes looked crayoned in. He looked at Lola so carelessly that she felt she wasn’t being looked at at all.

“I live here,” she said. “And my husband lives here.” She began backing into the trailer. She was afraid to look down at herself or where she was going because she thought that if she did, she would find something dreadfully disarranged.

“If we leave the truck setting in one place, them dawgs will find hit,” Cale said.

“No,” she said.

“Oh yeah, that’s shor right,” Cale smiled.

She dropped what she was carrying into a chair and slammed the door shut and locked it. Then she poured herself a drink and walked back to the bathroom and closed and locked that door and sat on the edge of the tub and sipped her drink. She was a nice person! She was clean. She didn’t throw things out the car window. Her mouth quivered on the rim of the glass. At her feet was a newspaper. A headline said

She finished the drink and unlocked the bathroom door and walked down the hallway to the kitchen. Cale and J.J. were standing in the living room. Even before she saw them, she could smell the cold air of the woods and their muddy woolen clothes.

“We thought you’d gone and was trying to find paper to write you a note,” Cale said. “We’ve had some drinks of your water and we wanted to tell you about the hogs that’s been running through your yard.”

“I locked that door,” Lola said faintly.

“Nome.”

“I know I did.”

“Nome. We could open hit.”

Lola sat down on the couch. She thought of going back to the bathroom and getting the can of toilet bowl cleaner and throwing it in their eyes, but there wasn’t any place for her to
go after she had done that. There wasn’t any way for her to escape into the woods. It would be like trying to run off the edge of the world, she knew. “Look,” she said severely, “my husband is a newscaster on television.”

They looked at her politely. “Whatsis name?” Cale asked.

“Dundey.” I have them now, she thought wildly. They’ll go now. “On WTVB. Jim Dundey.”

J.J. seemed interested for the first time. His mouth rolled back and his eyes glazed as though he’d been hit in the back of the head. He started laughing in short whistling gasps. “Jim Dandy! He’s suckering you. Thaters no name for a man. Thaters a name of dawg food!” He laughed carefully and with concentration as though it was something that took talent, and then stopped abruptly and shook his head. On the sleeve of his jacket was a wide crust of red, like a scab. Lola thought that if it fell off and onto her carpet, she would drop to the floor and never move again.

Cale wasn’t laughing but his face had squeezed up to two-thirds its regular size and his eyebrows were level with his hairline. Everyone was silent and not looking at each other.

“We don’t watch no television ourselfs,” Cale said in a hoarse voice. “We had a tee vee onct but we swopped hit for a Walker and before he run away he were a twice better Walker than hit were a tee vee.”

Lola felt that J.J.’s blue eyes were sitting in her lap. Inside, she was running and running and almost out of breath.

“I wouldn’t worry about that none,” Cale went on, “if that’s indeed his name. Someone’s given names to everything on this earth. There ain’t nothing what don’t got a name.” His cheeks fell in as though he had suddenly lost all his teeth. “Ain’t that sad?”

“I think that it’s a very good thing,” Lola said stiffly.

J.J. took two steps forward and two steps back. He smelled like a storm coming. “Bunch of smartasses went around and cat-a-logued hit all,” he muttered.

Cale ducked his head uncomfortably and pushed the curtains back. It was dusk and the trees were darker than the sky.
“Now,” he said, “if you would lookitere, you could see where them hogs torn the place up.”

Lola rose obediently and walked to the window. The ground was tumbled and stacked as though by several erratic plows. Long muddy nests were everywhere. Water-filled hollows. Small trees had been beaten over. The land looked bombed.

“I haven’t seen that before,” Lola said. “It always looks like a wreck out there to me.”

“You here all day long?” Cale asked.

Lola didn’t answer. The three of them were in a semicircle, looking at the woods, with their arms dangling and their faces empty as though they had just finished a long and meaningful conversation.

“What I mean was they make a racket. If you’d of heard em you could of shot em. That meat is just so lean and sweet …”

“Make enough noise coming through to wake the dead,” J.J. said fiercely, as though he had been insulted.

“Uh-huh,” Cale said.

“The quick and the dead,” J.J. continued. “You familiar with what is ‘quick’?”

Lola went to the kitchen sink and stood there, running water over her hands.

“Naw,” Cale said, “I ain’t.”

“Unborn,” J.J. said, shrugging.

“Noise even for that,” Cale said. “Hit’s probably true.”

“I am going to make dinner now for my husband,” Lola announced, “who is going to be back any moment. And I am going to make myself a drink.” She twisted the water faucets on as far as they would go and said, “Would you like to have a drink?” The running water made so much noise, she couldn’t hear herself saying it.

J.J. zipped up his jacket and opened the door. He whistled sharply. Nothing happened. He jumped off the deck, not bothering to shut the door, and they heard him get in the truck and start the motor.

“We’ll be going now,” Cale sighed. “I guess them hounds
might be waiting on the highway.” He started out the door and almost collided with J.J., who was coming back in.

“You’ll be watching out for them dawgs and keeping them for us then when they come by?” J.J. said, jerking his eyes over Lola. She tried not to pay attention to him. He wore baggy trousers with rows of flap pockets extending all the way down to the cuff. From one of the pockets, he took out three quarters and laid them on the table. “Jest tie em up and give em a bucket of water and this here is for food. One name Don, the black ‘n’ tan.”

“They won’t be coming through here,” Lola said. “You’ll find them someplace else.”

J.J. looked at her with no curiosity at all and, with Cale following, went back out to the truck.

“Bye fer now,” Cale said.

The truck tore away recklessly, leaving a smell of oil on the air.

It was six o’clock, the light almost gone, and time for the newscast. Lola turned on the television. She made a drink and drank it, then picked up the quarters from the table. On the television, something was being said. She turned off the sound and went outside, on the deck. The woods were wild at nightfall. She heard dim crashings and splashes and the bark of a dog, and through the gaps in the trees was a mottled sky of fading pink and grey discs, microbes moving toward the west.

She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldn’t save her. She lay down on the deck with the woods all around her. She lay on her stomach and stretched out her arms. She could see the ground through the spaces between the pine planking. Over the months, things had spilled down there. She saw a cigarette lighter and a pencil. She saw a spoon down there, dully twinkling, offering to her the blurred, quite unrecognizable image of her face.

I
T
had been three weeks since the girl’s German shepherd had died. He had drowned. The girl couldn’t get over it. She sat on the porch of her boyfriend’s beach house and looked at the water.

It was not the same water. The house was on the Gulf of Mexico. The shepherd had drowned in the bay.

The girl’s boyfriend had bought his house just the week before. It had been purchased furnished with mismatched plates and glasses, several large oak beds, an assortment of green wicker furniture and an art deco ice bucket with its handles in the shape of penguins.

The girl had a house of her own on the broad seawalled bay. The house had big windows overlooking shaggy bougainvillea bushes. There were hardly any studs in the frame and the whole house had shaken when the dog ran through it.

The girl’s boyfriend’s last name was Chester and everyone called him that. He was in his mid-thirties. The girl realized she was no kid herself. She was five years younger than he was. Chester favored trousers with legs of different colors and wore sunglasses the color of champagne bottles. He wore them day and night like a blind man. Chester had a catamaran. He loved to cook. “It’s just another way to cook eggs,” he’d say as he produced staggeringly delicious blintzes on Sunday morning. Chester had a writing dentist who had serviced the Weathermen in college. Chester had wide shoulders, great hands
and one broken marriage on which he didn’t owe a dime.

“You have fallen into the pie,” the girl’s friends told her.

Three days before the shepherd had drowned, Chester had asked the girl to marry him. They had known each other almost a year. “I love you,” he said, “let’s get married.” They had taken a Quaalude and gone to bed. That had been three weeks and three days ago. They were going to be married in four days. Time is breath, the girl thought.

The girl sat on a rusted glider with faded cushions and drank bourbon from a glass printed with orange suns and pink flamingos. She wore skimpy flowered shorts and a black T-shirt. Tears ran down her face.

The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, “Do you love me?” he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight.

The shepherd had been five years old when he drowned. The girl had had him since he was two months old. She had bought him from a breeder in Miami, a man who had once been a priest. The girl’s shepherd came from a litter of five with excellent bloodlines. The mother was graceful and friendly, the father more solemn and alert. The breeder who had once been a priest made the girl spend several minutes alone with each puppy and asked her a great many questions about herself. The girl didn’t know what she was doing actually. She had never thought about herself much. When she had finally selected her puppy, she sat in the kitchen with the breeder and drank a Pepsi. The puppy stumbled around her feet, nibbling at the laces of her sneakers. The breeder smoked and talked to the girl with a great deal of assurance. The girl had been quite in awe of him.