Typical (3 page)

One night my special child, Lonnie, was involved in some ghost-story telling in a tent in the back yard. He went outside and squatted close and yelled
haint.
No one had corrected him against the word (or will); it was to him clearly guilty of association with
ain’t.
Inches from his straining face a startled copperhead drew back. I possessed that snake to simply smile.

While it occurs to me, Brody did not become a dogfighter, any more than I was a queer librarian, despite his acknowledged associations with real dogfighters and despite my developed habit of looking over reading glasses at ill-bred men.

Here’s Brody: I was going to be a
big dog
fighter. It’s something. The
de
fenses. The
dogs
is still good. But… it’s not for me. It’s the people. The trash. It’s just not for me.

His old man, the preacher: My boy, I don’t know
what
he is, come specifically to it. I know he’s
not
a preacher. I know he’s got a hundred monsters on chains in a piece of swamp he bought. You tell me. I don’t know what he is. What does a man do with monsters on chains in a swamp, comes by in a new Buick or new panel truck all the time? To talk about
nothing.
Any old kid can just trying things out run away once, even leave his own mother picking cotton alone—me, I was at the Bible convention. But to turn out a common man, that tries me, that almost tries my
faith.

A dogfighter: Ho! Dogfight’ll take ten
years
off your life. God, the yelling and swearing and … niggers! Nigger don’t know how to act no matter
where
you put him. And they ain’t all of it. I just go to cockfights now.
Gentlemen
still run a cockfight.

And dear Lonnie: My Aunt Humpy she is not buried very deep. She can hear talk. I think they don’t even know where she is buried, because if you say certain things, anywhere, like even in Darlington under the canopy for a race, they say she can hear it even though you can’t hear it yourself what your own self says. I want to be sure she hears it if she can get to turn over when she does.

My dear sister Cecelia: it’s hard to say your own sister was a queer, but I have to admit it. That’s the worst thing. Rescuing Brody from the brier patch with his tied-up suitcase was a drop in the bucket next to the main crimes, though that was about the first of the big ones. She was an intellectual. They say the library over at Pembert is still ahead of its time, even though they stopped spending money on it when she died. She had nothing to do with Brody
staying
gone four years, coming home married to a Mormon girl, of all things. They rolled up in a newish pickup, all sheepish looks at the ground, one sofa and about five of them dogs tied in the back, the dogs sitting on the sofa smiling at everything, like what a joke it all was.

Brody on the dogs: These dogs you read about eating babies don’t have a thing to do with it. I’ve sold three thousand dogs in ten years and not one of them has bit a child or I’d know. I’d know about it
quick,
buddyro. I sell these dogs to people who pay $300, and when they pay $300 they don’t expect something to eat their children. I don’t think most of my dogs would bite a man without proper training, to tell the truth. They don’t have to.

Ceece even says it: my picking up Brody and setting him on the road to ruin is minuscule. Queer. Ha. Or, Ho!

It is funny how folk can extrapolate aberrations ultimately all to the sexual: to say, the first child in a family of heathen to receive an education—to refine himself in virtually any way—will be sooner or later alleged homosexual. And naturally my relatives, my living relatives, were no different. Let me essay to classify us our clan directly, lest anyone waste energy on the very simplest of human taxonomy by my failure to state the obvious. We are white North Carolina Baptist—not the absolute worst run of trash on earth only because of a strange rubbing off of the otherwise bogus
FIRST IN FREEDOM
presumptions wafting out of the Research Triangle.

I am grateful to be able now to take the long view, as we say here. We see the earth many ways, time in its various dimensions—one of my favorites is the micrometer slice of a living life. It is possible to see Brody that day as if he is on a thin transparency cut from the waxen log that his whole life, and all lives around him, have come to be. The nice light of one pure moment shines easily through him as he stands, nervous, courage-screwed, hugging his suitcase, in the wet briers. He looks rather like an overgrown, beaten child. We can place a slice of a later Brody over this same setting: today, for example, he stands there waiting for me (not for me, for anyone) in blue polyester pants the color of the sky and an olive duck shirt he cannot keep tucked in, his crew cut a little shaggy, looking diffidently off to the ground near one of his hard shoes, still looking a little beat-up. That quality remains: though he did not become a dog-fighter, he did come close enough to share the common mark of the fraternity—the beaten-up. Dogfighters look, to a man (not to mention the ladies), beaten-up, despite brave cosmetics against it: buntline pistols, leather sport jackets, fancy boots, contractors’ jewelry, full bellies and pomaded hair, and many, many Mickey Gilley smiles. This is partly why they take the pleasure they do in watching a thoroughbred dog, conditioned to a point suggesting piano wires and marble, reduced by another sculpted cat to a soft red lump resembling bloody terry cloth.

There is Brody, his nose suggesting a broken nose, his slightly wet eyes, looking mystified by nothing in particular, looking up the road at someone (me) coming, taking a deep breath to step out into view to discover if it is someone who will help or hinder him run away, to discover it is me and that he will need to compound the crime of escaping with that of lying. Yes’m, he says, almost before I ask, Ceece knows I’m going. Of course she knows.

Well, I guess she would, I say, smiling, touching his knee, which he has pressed hard into his suitcase, as though he would if he could compress the thing into nothing so that no more suspicion might be raised. This was the moment I first knew I was going to die. I do not mean to sound so melodramatic—I was to live yet for years.

I mean to say that when I saw Brody running, and when I saw myself aiding and abetting, I saw myself fully defined as the black sheep I was, and for once I was legitimate (I had
company
—with Brody there we were a conspiracy of two black-wool fools), and in a complex surge of emotion I loved little Brody, loved him much more than any queer aunt could confess, and I saw at the same time, as one truly does very few times in a normal life, that I was actually going to die someday, go to a funeral as the lead, and I considered seducing Brody and dismissed seducing Brody. He would hoot to hear that today, but
that
day he would not have chuckled, and I could have had my way with him, if a queer forty-year-old librarian popping out of a girdle did not scare the priapic wits out of him, which I presumed at the time not unlikely. And so I put Brody out on a corner in Lumberton, helped him become in his attempted escape the only other member of this clan to attend college (one of several accidents that befell him), and stand accused of—not merely accused, am held responsible for—his low living today, the very thing his escape was to have been from, and I the only one who helped him go.

Brody has come to ignore the church, crime one, and make money without holding a job, crime two. At this minute he is talking to a man he cannot understand in Taiwan who wants ten grown bulldogs. The Oriental cannot understand Brody either, because the English he knows is not the English Brody practices. And Brody is not altogether fluent in some Charlie Chan English that seems to parody the
r/l
problem.

Brody says: Imone sin you tin
young
dawgs.

Mr. Ho says: They rast rong time, we purchase rots burrdog to you, Mista Blode.

Brody: No sir, iss not the wrong time. I just caint keep puppies till they grown dawgs.

Ho: Rots.

Brody: Rots?

Ho: Yes!

Brody: What do you
mean?

Ho: Satisfactly.

Brody:
What is?

Ho: You, Mista Blode.

Brody: Send me a check for five thousand dollars.

Ho: Thank you.

How did Brody’s escape fail? Or did it fail? Perhaps it did not. He came back with full intention of becoming a dogfighter. He fell, or stopped, short. He decided to make the dogs but not make them fight. Which is an inaccurately cute way of putting it: one doesn’t need to make these dogs fight. They volunteer.

I couldn, you know, stand to knock so many dawgs in the head. That’s what you have to do.
He is talking about culling, culling the cowards and the inept from the brave and the strong, which in practice means shooting beautiful year-old dogs because they do not measure up. It is a point of pride with a dogfighter to allow a dog to
live
on his yard. This blood courage in dogs (parlance; I mean
in dogfighting,
but one commonly says
in dogs)
is an outrigger courage, a pontoon of vicarious guts running beside your own tipsy, slender, sinkable soul, your soul which accepts bad teeth, bad jobs, bad diet, which purports to refuse all injustice done you since and because of the Civil War, purports to accept no slight or slander and yet must take all and every, and so locates one accidental day, or night, a
dog,
two dogs with jaw muscles like golf balls addressing each other
like men
—not taking no for an answer. Your trod-down my-daddy’s-daddy’s-daddy-was-whipped-and-lost-his-cotton soul, now eating Cheetos instead of smothered quail and oysters hauled up from Charleston, standing there in blue jeans with a pistol in your armpit, sees an answer to all the daily failures of a failing late-trailer-payment life, and a dogfighter is born.

The real item: I tookeem home and tiedeem up in a inner tube and hungeem and beateem with a hammer. I coottn killeem acause he was swingin and bouncin like iss, springy—the rubber, you know, leteem git away. But I gotteem, the quittin bastard, quit on me like that, I never been so embairsed in my life.

—If a dog fight for me an hour good as that—

—And you a fool, too.

—Well, tell you what, Jackie. Meet me ahine my house with your tube and your hammer, and I get me a rig, and we get up in a tree and go at it. I want to see
you
go an hour.

—You don’t have the
least
notion what a good dog
is.

—Yes I do. You had one.

—That’s fuckin right. I had one. And I git rid of the next one I git like it the damned
straight
same way.

Alive, I never went to a dogfight, but I have been since. I did also go one night looking for Brody in his kennel, the first time I went there, and found myself suddenly ringed by what seemed large big cats axled to the ground on chains begging me with body wags to pet them.

His old man: If his Aunt Humpy had known what she was setting in motion that morning she’d of killed herself, I hope. We are not fancy people, airs and all, but we are not common. She might have even knowed he was lying, that Cecelia would of never let him go to Lumberton or anywhere else during cotton. But even so she could not have knowed that that little lift would have created our largest disgrace. It defies my logic. It defies my logic.

Brody: She wouldn’t let it wait to dry out, and when you pull, you know, on the bolls, when they wet, they
pool
back, and you get this—it hurts.

My fine living relatives say that, in general, my problem was reading too many books. What they cannot guess is that when I saw Brody step out of the briers on the Lumberton road I thought, There’s Brody, making his move, as wild and plenary
as a character in a book.
I knew Ceece wasn’t letting him go anywhere. He had on these huge, hard shoes and brilliant white socks, and he was pigeon-toed. His suitcase had straw on it. He even tried while standing to hide the suitcase between his legs, which made him more pigeon-toed.

I bought a beanfield, if fifty acres can be called a field, and Land Banked it, let it fallow, and took to walking the regenerating scrub in my after-work dress: pantsuit and parasol. For the first years I could be seen, of course, so the people were able to graft on one more badge of idiosyncrasy to the already highly decorated spinster librarian. The parasol contributed more to this, I think, than simply walking one’s field (indeed, walking banked land out here is regarded a normal if unfortunate substitute for farming it), the parasol that carried with it—last seen bobbing over the tops of three-year pines—a suggestion of spinsterism that I believe included in local mythos not only elements Southern but New England as well. I was a kind of Scarlett-Emily, witch and Poppins, gathering beggar weeds. The truth was, I carried the umbrella less from a concern with image or sun than from a concern with lizards, of which I had an inordinate fear and an equally misinformed notion of parrying the assaults of with said rapier.

This field was a curious purchase for anyone, let alone a woman seen swordfighting lizards at dusk in it. It was worthless as cropland. But I had decided at some point to own some earth, and it did not matter to me which part, and that scrubby squat is what I took. Brody sweet himself put the idea in my head when he bought the adjacent fifteen acres that were even less desirable by farming standards. He got his dog stock chained down to it and managed thereby to depress even further the local values. So I took an adjacent fifty. You do things like that in life, and the less readily the act can be made to seem sensible the more gratifying it is. I was proud, daft owner of my useless spread, and in five years of strolling it I had intimate trails, trails pressed into the weeds by a combination of my random prowling and the more purposed prowling of rabbits and rodents and I think in the end even deer. I was happy with that sorry field.

I will confess to having lived finally a hungry, hollow life. I never left Pembroke and I had the stuff to have been anywhere. Yet whether my life was a failure or not is not the large matter, I hope: for I look at all the people who for one reason or another do not rise but remain routine and routinely small, and their failure as a class does not seem to amount to anything.