Will & I (13 page)

 

22

After graduating, I had no idea what I was going to do. Lots of college graduates say that, but I truly had no idea, about what I wanted to do or even what my options were. I only knew what I didn't want to do: anything to do with stagnation. My parents seemed content with my doing nothing. I'd already triumphed in their eyes, for which I'm thankful now but at the time I took as yet another uncomfortable indicator. The lack of expectation—from anyone—gave me some sense of freedom. But that didn't last long.

When I was in this state, my first disability check came. I can't really blame my father for signing me up for benefits. For once I was overly qualified for something. But I did resent it, and I again became distraught in an almost out-of-body way. Was this really happening? It seemed as if the door to the future, any future, was now shut and dead-bolted behind me. I felt trapped.

Mainly to breathe, but also to be able to do things for myself without my parents jumping all over me, I decided to move to our family's lake cabin two hours south of Birmingham and try to write about everything that had happened. I knew there was more to the story than just the facts of what had happened to me. I decided that I should turn it into a novel. I can remember setting up my computer on one end of the kitchen table and self-consciously thinking, “It starts here.” I was sure the final product would somehow save me. From what exactly, I didn't know. All I needed to do was write it.

I worked on it diligently for months, trying various approaches to avoid presenting myself as someone who'd simply and sentimentally beaten the odds. I'd written my senior philosophy paper on Aristotle's use of
katharsis
in the Poetics, but that approach—turning my story into a tragedy—seemed too confining. But the story refused to be contained. Like before, I was living it while I was trying to write about it. Trying to make graduating from college the end, when I didn't even walk to receive my diploma, just felt too much like an after-school special. I'm thankful, as much as I wanted otherwise, that I was able to step out of the way.

Shortly after I moved into the lake house, I saw a fox out on the deck one night. We'd had the house since I was in the fifth grade, and I'd seen plenty of wild animals around there through the years, but I'd never seen a fox, not up close like that. Maybe it thought no one was there. Usually that was the case. I thought that by switching on the floodlights, I could make it leave. I was wrong. Nor did it run off when I opened the door. It tried, but the deck sat about fifteen feet off the ground, and the only way off (besides jumping) was the set of stairs it must have taken up, and I was standing by those. It scrabbled to two different corners before realizing it would have to confront my presence. Something about its skittishness and size made me completely unafraid.

I thought about cutting the lights again, because I knew how scared it must be, but instead of walking over to the switch, I just stepped back inside the screen door and gave it a chance to get away. Finally it walked back to the top of the steps. But it didn't descend. It stood there.

Once the animal was back under the light, I realized that it wasn't what I'd thought. Everything about it looked exactly like a fox, even its size, except it didn't have a long, bushy tail. The one it did have was only about a foot long. I'd heard of other wild-domestic hybrids—especially of wolves and coyotes—and I wondered if that's what this thing was. It had no collar. It just looked wild, and it definitely acted wild. I guessed that it hadn't run off because it was starving. There was a grill on the deck that it may have smelled. It had a lean snout and body, and what looked like mange or some other skin disease, but it didn't appear emaciated. Whatever it was, it wasn't going anywhere.

I went inside and found some bread, then walked back out and set it down. After I stepped back, the creature immediately crept up and sniffed, but didn't eat. It looked up at me instead. I didn't know what it wanted, and I wasn't about to touch it. After we'd stared at each other for a few more seconds, I went back inside and cut the lights.

The next morning the bread was gone, but I didn't see the fox-dog. I went outside and walked around the cabin. There was no sign. I even called out, “Hey!” but got back only silence. Romantic visions of taming a wild animal—validating my existence and perfecting the
Walden
-like qualities of it—vanished with strangely little regret, considering the enthusiasm with which they'd formed.

I left to go walking that afternoon, and before I'd even reached the base of the big hill that the cabin sat on, I turned around and found that she—I could clearly see now that she was a girl, her tail was up—was following me. Over the next two weeks, she was always there, whenever I went outside, waiting for me to give her something to eat. I wasn't fully committed yet, toward claiming her as mine—I hadn't named her—but I was starting to suspect that she wasn't going anywhere.

One morning I looked out the kitchen window and saw her running along the beach that forms every winter when the water level drops. A rust-colored animal was chasing her, just a blur. I hurried outside, hoping the pursuer would see me and run off. But they were just playing. They darted among the sand and rocks, and neither was trying that hard to catch or get caught. Both noticed me at the same time and stopped in their tracks. It was as if I'd caught them at something they knew they shouldn't be doing. I started to laugh. The fox-dog, with a lowered back, began creeping toward me and the other reluctantly followed. I could see as it walked that it was undeniably a dog, a bigger fluffy dog, mainly chow, with a tail that curled back over its body. It wasn't wearing a collar either, but it clearly was, or had been, someone's pet. It carried itself like an animal used to responding to commands.

I went back inside, hoping it would eventually get bored and go on its way. I didn't want to have to take care of another animal. It was only then that I realized I'd already resigned myself to taking care of the fox-dog for her brief life. For some reason I was sure that it would be brief. She was already full-grown. How much longer could she have?

I didn't throw out any scraps that day for her food, because I didn't want the chow to take it and get any ideas.

When I set out to go walking the next morning, only the fox-dog came out from under the cabin to join me. I walked for about an hour, to a spot little more than a mile from the cabin, where my road intersected with another. I was strolling along, thinking how fortunate I was to have escaped having another mouth to feed, when the chow came crashing out of the woods like he was late for an appointment.

After days of failed efforts to get rid of him—which included cutting off the food supply and forcibly relocating him to a gated community five miles away—I decided he, too, had earned his keep. I named the two immediately, before I had time to think about it. Clinging maybe to a vestige of my original romantic vision for the cabin, I named them Daisy and Jay, after the lovers in
The Great Gatsby
. That night I put out two bowls of food.

A few months later, after a bloody fight over food, I took them to the local vet to get checked out. That's when I discovered my error. Because everything about Jay said male, I never thought to check under all that fur. It turned out, however, that he was a she. She picked fights with everything, no matter its size, and she usually won. I saw her back down from another dog only once—a much bigger pound dog—that she then became friends with so they could be bullies together. She peed with a raised leg, too, which I found out was because one of her back legs was shorter than the other one. And if any other animal wandered onto my property, she, followed by Daisy, promptly ran it off—or if it were an unsuspecting rabbit, raccoon, or armadillo, they would kill it.

Once I was in the kitchen and saw Daisy through the window, and for a second I thought she'd had a stroke. She was standing, but otherwise seemed to have become catatonic. Walking out, I looked at the tree she was facing, and saw a cat trapped halfway up it. Daisy had the focused, dispassionate gaze of a predator on the Serengeti, as if she'd become one half of an equation that already had an answer. The cat must have sensed this, too, because it started crying. Daisy didn't blink, nor did she respond in the slightest to my commands to leave it alone. I finally had to go back inside and get a leash to pull her away. She was transformed. For a second I thought she might even attack me.

It took only a little while before the dogs figured out that, although I may be a pushover in some areas, I'm also lazy enough not to bother with the initiative needed for discipline. After a few times waiting around while the dogs were off in the woods, when I was ready to go to Birmingham, I started leaving them. They looked hurt and betrayed when I returned, as if I'd broken a rule, but they caught on quick. At first they'd looked to me for direction in all circumstances. When they saw it wasn't coming, they learned to think for themselves. We became something like a team, belonging to one another, however unwittingly. No matter where we were, in what house or what town, Daisy slept in the bed next to me, and Jay on the threshold of the door to that room.

 

23

Six months into my stay at the lake, I had a complete draft of my “novel.” I knew it didn't work. Parts did, but basically, nothing held it together. It wasn't a story so much as an account. I decided I needed to become a better writer before trying again. I gave away one of the beds in the guest bedroom, put a prefabricated desk in there, and began to read and write in greater earnest, meaning that was pretty much all I did. My reading mainly consisted of short stories and novels, since that's what I was trying to write. I have a strong memory of reading an early translation of
Anna Karenina
by candlelight while drenched in a filmy sweat because the power had gone out again. It's one of the few objective images I have of myself from that period. I had stopped imagining myself as much, or picturing myself from the outside. I did go up to Birmingham every once in a while, to get my “social fix,” but going out on the town involved subjecting myself to a sea of first impressions that remained most people's only impression.

My stories were mostly weak imitations of writing I liked, but I was prolific, and I showed them to whoever would read them, offering them as some kind of proof. My only truly loyal reader was my grandmother, who read each one multiple times. After my grandfather's death, when I was in high school, she'd moved to a ground-floor apartment that had its own roof—part of a complex that my parents had lived in as newlyweds. O'mama began spending more and more of her time reading. She'd always been an avid reader and had written some reviews when she was younger, but as her friends began dying off, reading filled a void. She would check out ten books a week from the library, and when her eyesight began fading, if she couldn't find a large-print edition of a book she wanted to read, she'd scan the pages with a magnifying glass.

I trusted her opinion of my work. O'mama's aunt and namesake, Blanche Colton Williams, had been the inaugural editor of the O. Henry Memorial Awards in 1918. Until Oprah Winfrey came along, she was (according to O'mama) the best-known person to come out of Kosciusko, Mississippi. O'mama also had a first cousin, Wirt Williams, who moved to L.A. after World War II and became a successful novelist.

I went over to her apartment to read and write on the afternoons I was in town. She would take her two fingers of bourbon and Coca-Cola into the closet of a den to watch
Judge Judy
while I sat at the dining room table and lost track of time. She would occasionally come out for more fingers and to report on the latest case, always idiotic and easily simplified by Judy, and eventually she'd sit down to discuss my latest story. She didn't give a comprehensive critique of them like a writing professor would have done, but she knew if a story didn't work. “It fits together” was about as detailed as she got. But she could tell when my writing started to get tighter, after I'd given up the novel and started writing short fiction again. I believed her because I thought so, too.

One of my first attempts was about an old lady with a Pomeranian and a sense of entitlement who's become addicted to painkillers after losing her husband. I'd been reluctant to show it to her, because it was clearly based on her—at one point detailing exactly an argument she'd had with her sister—but she walked out to the dining room that day shaking the rolled-up pages and said, “Oh, Clay, one of your best. You're definitely on your way.”

“I thought you might get mad.”

She smiled. “Mad? Why? I don't have a dog.”

I didn't point out all the other similarities, but I don't think she would have cared anyway. Writing, my writing specifically, existed on a different plane from the one she lived on. It couldn't touch her, and at the same time she was protective of it. I knew that her enthusiasm wasn't just grandmotherly cheerleading, because she'd let me know if she didn't think a story worked, usually by immediately asking about another one she thought did. She tried to get me to submit them for publication, and some I did, but after getting rejected by most of the big names, I moved on to another story.

“I just wish Bibs was still around,” she said, talking about her aunt. Blanche would have given better advice.

The only other person who took an interest in my writing during the months I spent at the cabin—not that many people got close enough to take an interest—was a man named Jack. He never read anything I wrote, but he took an interest in the sheer fact that I was writing. He and my father had lived together after college. He'd grown up in a small town just a few miles away from where the cabin stood. Like my father, Jack could and would talk to anyone, always establishing a historical context for the relationship. When meeting one of my friends, sooner or later he'd come around to the question, “Who are your people?” He seemed like a character straight out of a Peter Taylor story, or like Taylor himself, on one level an upper-middle-class, country-club-attending Southern gentleman, but with so many levels to his character, only a fool would take him for one-dimensional. He easily could have taught history, both of the American South and of Saudi Arabia, where he'd lived for most of his adult life. He was the perfect friend to have at the lake, because he knew everyone and everyone knew him. Given that I was an aspiring writer, he took it as his duty to show me everything in the immediate area that might be culturally of interest. Once we went to a Baptist tent revival at a country church. We got a behind-the-scenes tour at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, where Jack had once been a ranger. Another time we met with the commandant of a nearby military school where Jack was a donor. He told us that most of the students were problem kids who'd been kicked out of other places, but that about 35 percent were there willingly.