Last Days of the Dog-Men

AGNES OF BOB

AGNES MENKEN, MISSING HER LEFT EYE, AND BOB the bulldog, missing his right, often sat together on their porch, Agnes in her straight-backed rocking chair and Bob in her lap. Together they could see anything coming, Bob to one side and Agnes to the other. They always seemed to be staring straight ahead but really they were looking both ways.

Whereas Bob’s bad right eye was sewn up, Agnes had a false one that roved. It was obvious to her that people often had trouble telling which eye was the good one, so sometimes she would look at them awhile with the good one, and then when they’d become comfortable with this she switched and looked at them with the false one, which was clear and had the direct hard-bearing frankness of detachment. In her good eye’s peripheral vision she could see the general distress that this caused.

Despite his years and his sewn-up eye, Bob was as stout and fit as a young dog. He stayed that way naturally, as dogs of his type will, having the metabolism of all small muscular animals. He was tight, compact— much like her late husband, Pops, but just the opposite of Agnes, who was lanky. Officially, he had been Pops’s dog, the son he’d never had, she supposed. In that way Agnes had felt at best like a stepmother, standing just a little apart. Pops and Bob had understood one another, shared a language of some kind that only they’d understood, whereas Agnes could never tell if Bob was listening to her or not.

Nevertheless, she and Bob had become closer in the year since Pops had died. They had their routine together. Bob ate twice a day, morning and evening. He got to stay outside in the fenced backyard as long as he wanted during the day. At night he slept on Agnes’s bed, down near the footboard. And every evening, once early and once late, she let him out to pee in the yard. A neighbor wandered out back to look at the moon would see the light on her back.porch snap on, the door creak open, see Bob come flying out onto the grass, snarling and grunting the way Boston bulldogs do, dashing around in the dark near the back of the yard. But Agnes hadn’t the patience with him Pops’d had, how Pops would sit at the kitchen table smoking, sipping coffee, waiting till Bob sauntered back up to the door and barked to be let back in. Now, Bob would hardly have time to pee before the door creaked open on its hinges again and Agnes started in on him, saying, “Where are you? What are you doing back there? Go on, now. Go on and do what you’re gonna do. What are you doing? Come on. Come on in here and finish up your supper. I want to go to bed. Come on in this door. Where are you? Please, Bob. I’m tired, boy. What are you doing out there? Come on in here. Come on. Come on.” Then Bob would stop, sniff around, shoot a quick stream into the monkey grass, lob a fading arc to the bark of the popcorn tree, and then leap back into the light of the porch. And she would pull the door shut, turn all three dead bolts, snap off the kitchen light, and feel her way along the hallway to bed.

EXCEPT FOR THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR ON HER EAST SIDE, where the professor lived with with his wife and two little girls, this seemed to Agnes like a neighborhood of widows. Next door on the west side was Lura Campbell, eighty-four, who insisted on driving every day. She did all right once she got out of her azalea-lined driveway, but she had the worst time trying to back herself out. On this morning, Agnes lay in bed and listened to Lura’s old Impala wheeze to a start, clank into Reverse, back up a little ways, and then screee, into the azaleas. Clank clank, into Drive, pull forward. Clank clank, into Reverse, back up. Screee, into the azaleas. Clank clank, into Drive, pull forward. Clank clank, into Reverse, back up. Screee, into the azaleas. All the way down her driveway. Drove Agnes crazy. She’d said to Lura, I don’t see why you feel like you got to get out and go every morning. Well, I like to go, Lura said. I don’t see any sense in going just to be going, Agnes said. Well, Lura said, I just have to get out and go somewhere, I can’t sit here at the house.

Agnes did not want to end up like Lura, an aimless, doddering wanderer driving down the middle of the street in her ancient automobile threatening dogs and children. She hoped that something would happen to ease her on out of the world before she got that way, that she would die in her sleep or simply somehow disappear, whisked into thin air by the hand of God. She had made her peace with God, though she’d never liked religion. She certainly wasn’t afraid of God, like she had been once without realizing it. She would face God like she would anybody else, with dignity and demanding a little respect in return. She’d never willingly offended God, had only ignored Him a little, like everyone else. But recently she had silently said, If it comes a time when it’s convenient to You, go ahead.

She thought, Maybe I’ll see Pops, and with two good eyes.

She fished her glass one out of the little dish of solution on the bedside table, popped it in, and eased her legs off the side of the bed. As soon as her toes touched the cool bare floor, Bob was there, leaping into the air around her like a circus dog.

“Get,” she waved at him, shuffling into the kitchen to make coffee. “Get.”

The coffee made, she poured a cup, took it out to the porch, and no sooner had her bottom touched the chair than Bob jumped into her lap, circled, and settled in his sphinxlike pose to observe the traffic.

Carolyn Barr and April Ready walked briskly by, swinging their arms like majorettes. They waved, Agnes nodded. The women, in their sixties, had the legs of thirty-year-olds.

“Amazing, Bob,” Agnes muttered. “I bet I know why their old boys kicked off.”

She and Pops had had what she’d considered a normal life, in that regard. Toward the end, Pops got to where he wasn’t interested, and she didn’t mind, much. The truth was, they’d never really gotten over the embarrassment. She’d always figured more sex would’ve been a good thing, but she’d never brought it up with Pops. It seemed frivolous. They’d never talked about sex, never even used the word. She’d always worked, just like him. Forty years! Forty years at the power company for her. He’d kept books at the steam feed works, never retired. A chain-smoker with Coke-bottle-thick glasses, he came home smoking, seemed like steam from the works leaking out of his thick windows onto the world. When he had his attack, he fell into a pile of foundry sand and suffocated.

The day Pops had died, the widow Louella Marshall (a Baptist) had come by. Her husband, Herbert, had been dead for ten years, and since then she hadn’t so much as had coffee with a man. She’d married her church, is what she said. Agnes couldn’t stand her because she seemed so smug, and Agnes couldn’t believe she wasn’t a phony, a religious bully who was scared to death of dying herself, afraid she was going to hell for having secretly wished her bullying husband would die and leave her alone. Agnes wasn’t afraid of going to hell, but when Louella sat in her armchair and made like to comfort her by saying God had taken Pops to be with Him in heaven, she had gotten so angry she took her coffee cup and saucer into the kitchen and dashed them in the sink. She didn’t pretend to have dropped them.

After that, for a while, she frequently had a dream in which she was swimming out in the middle of the ocean, strong as one of those nuts that used to swim across the English Channel. But then there was a roaring sound, and she’d look up and see it was the edge of the world, and a beast would rise up with the body of a dragon and the face of Pops, which then changed into the dog face of Bob, and she awoke in her bedroom where the blue night-light made the damp air seem like water and the breeze through the window sounded like ocean swells and it took her some minutes to calm down and hear Bob down at the foot of her bed, grunting and thrashing in some dream of his own.

She had realized then that she was afraid of dying, and afraid of what had happened to Pops. But she could not be like Louella and believe that this was God’s will, that he had singled out Pops like an assassin. She decided that she would face the possibility of her own death with dignity, by inviting it in, leaving the door unlocked, and that in that way she would be in charge and unafraid. We all know death better than we think, she said to herself.

The only one who’d said anything interesting on that day at her house had been poor Lura Campbell, who had sat tiny and quiet on Agnes’s huge old sofa and sipped her coffee and said, when there’d been a long quiet spell in the room, “I think if I had it to do all over again, after Lester passed away, I’da done some traveling.”

Louella Marshall said, “Well, Lura, where in the world would you’ve gone? To Florida?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lura said. “I’da just got into my car and gone.”

Lura and her car.

AGNES DIDN’T SOCIALIZE WITH ANY OF THE WIDOWS. SHE tended the yard and looked after Bob and kept the house fairly clean and watched for rare birds at her feeders. She didn’t see many rare birds, which was natural seeing as how they were rare, but the occasional chickadee or purple finch made it interesting enough.

Warm days, she sunned in her lounge chair on the patio out back, her eyes shut tight against the glare and the heat, talking to Bob the whole time. She could hear him grunting and snuffling and rooting around like a hog. Whenever he was quiet she raised up and looked, to see if anyone had walked up, and then lay back down. She hated sunbathing, but it was good for the psoriasis, and it helped fight her natural pallor, which made her feel like those little cave frogs she’d seen once on a trip to the mountains with Pops. Little red eyes and the rest of them clear as a jellyfish, you could see their little hearts pumping and their veins jumping, like their skins were made of glass.

Sometimes she volunteered to take the little girls next door to the pool. Swimming was good for her, the doctor said, and Agnes had always liked the water. She wasn’t much on the surface, since she was too slim to float, but she liked to be underwater, moving along in steady breaststrokes like a long slow fish. She liked the look of things underwater, the silent and bright world that seemed strange in the way that a dream is, very intimate and distant at the same time.

After a swim, lying in the sun beside the pool was easier than tanning in her buggy backyard with Bob always snorting around. She’d take a brush and brush her wet hair straight back and forget about it. She couldn’t do anything with it anymore, it was getting so thin and frizzy. The gray she didn’t care about. She pretty much let Sherilyn just chop it short and do it up in a little permanent. She got it washed once a week. She knew short hair made her neck look longer, but there wasn’t any way around that. Her good eye was a little smaller than the false one and a little reddened from strain, her nose was a little long, and her back was bent just a little forward because of less than ideal posture. She could see this when she walked past a storefront window and saw her reflection. Now, to boot, her fingers were swollen with a mild arthritis and there were the faded, healed reminders of a few small sores on her arms and legs from the psoriasis. It was a good thing she never cared much about appearances. And after a swim, with her muscles tingling from the exercise, she cared even less.

Nevertheless, a tan seemed to help all of that, and helped create a natural vigor, and in her mind’s eye she sought a dignity in the way she looked and mentally compared herself to a tall gray crane beside a bay or a lake, and she tried to carry herself with that dignity in mind. She walked slowly and deliberately, like a crane, and without thinking kept her eye fixed that way, like they did when they were fishing or just stalking along.

IT WAS A NATURAL COMPARISON, GIVEN HER INTEREST IN birds and the three feeders she kept in her backyard.

“Look at that, Bob,” she’d say. “I believe that’s a towhee pecking around down there.” Bob stared at her, jaws clamped. Then he let his tongue out again and started panting.

She sometimes forgot it was Pops who’d first started watching the birds. Feeding them, anyway. He built the feeders in his shop out in the garage. Then he started to read about them a little, and he’d keep track of when they came and went, and he’d sit with her in the kitchen sipping coffee and looking out at the feeders in the spring and announce their arrivals from Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and Venezuela, Peru and Colombia and Costa Rica. “Flown here nonstop from the Yucatan,” he’d say. “Made a little stop down on the coast.”

And he took her down there one time in the season. They put on their sun gear, light long-sleeved shirts and khaki pants and tennis shoes and light socks, broad hats, sunglasses and binoculars. They drove down the beach road to the old fort and camped out for two days on the grounds with a bunch of odd ones who called themselves birders and walked the sandy trails and Pops made notes in a little spiral-bound notebook.

One day they were standing on the beach and birds started to fall out of the sky.

“Oh,” one of the birders cried, “it’s a tanager fallout.” A momentary alarm shook Agnes, naturally associating the word with its nuclear meaning. But then she caught on, birds plopping to the white sand all around them. Bright red birds with black wings and black tails, and dull yellow birds amongst them.

They’d stood still, as had all the others for some minutes, and then people began to get down on their hands and knees and take close-up pictures of the birds, who were too exhausted to move another feather. People picked them up and stroked them and set them back down. Before they could stop him, Bob — who’d cautiously sniffed at one bird — began taking them into his jaws and dropping them at her and Pops’s feet like gifts. Some of the birders got upset and started hollering like fools until Pops got Bob back on the leash and kept him from retrieving any more tanagers.

“He ain’t a retriever,” Pops said later. “He’s built for killing small animals. He knows we like the birds, I guess.”

That day, Agnes had stood there, the startling scarlet birds falling around her, and listened to the surf bashing at the sand, and she could see the churning tidal struggle down at the point, at the mouth of the bay. She looked out over the Gulf and thought about the birds having crossed all that water without even a rest, and she thought about the fishes and other creatures that traveled beneath those waters, strong and free as they pleased, roaming without the boundaries of continents or countries or cities and towns or jobs or houses or yards, and the idea of the freedom of such a journey stirred in her something like joy and something like frustration. She didn’t know what to do with it, this feeling, and she felt so strange standing amidst these people struck wild with wonder over the tanager fallout while all she could feel was the most curious detachment from it all.

SHE DECIDED SHE NEEDED TO GO TO THE POOL AND ON A whim thought it’d be nice to drive Lura over there with her. If Lura liked so much to go, then she’d give her somewhere to go to. She knew Lura wouldn’t swim, but it might be nice for her to sit in the shade and watch the others. Agnes put her swimsuit on and slipped a slightly faded sundress over it, got into her sandals and sunglasses, and went over to fetch Lura.

Lura was sitting in her automatic chair and she fumbled for the button, pushed it, and the chair began to rise slowly until it slid Lura out onto the floor on her feet and then sat there like a sproinged jack-in-the-box while Lura went into the kitchen to get Agnes a bowl of homemade ice cream.

“I don’t want any ice cream,” Agnes said. “Let’s get in my car and go over to the swimming pool.”

“I made this cream last week and it’s still good, but I can’t eat it all,” Lura said.

“I thought,” Agnes said loudly then, thinking maybe Lura didn’t have her hearing aid in, “that I would give you someplace to go, instead of just wandering. And you wouldn’t have to drive.”

“Well, I like to drive,” Lura said, fiddling in her silverware drawer. “I can drive just fine.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t drive, Lura. I just thought you might like to go someplace with me.”

“Well, I can drive us to the pool,” Lura said, like someone who’d been insulted.

Agnes felt her stomach knot up just thinking about riding with Lura, but she could see what this was turning into and went on out and got into Lura’s car and rolled down her window. After what must have been a quarter of an hour, Lura finally came down her back-porch steps wearing a light cotton dress with a floral print and carrying a wide, floppy garden hat that looked like a collapsed sombrero. She put the hat onto the seat between them and got in behind the giant steering wheel of the Impala. She looked like a child driving a city bus, Agnes thought.

Then Lura began her driving ritual. She pulled on her white cotton gloves and fished her keys out of her purse, chose the proper key, and inserted it into the ignition. She pumped the accelerator pedal one time with the toe of her sandal, then turned the key. The old engine turned over once, coughed, then died with a hydraulic sigh. Lura pumped again, turned the key, the engine wheezed once, caught, and Lura held her foot down until the car roared like a dump truck. She let it die back, and gently pulled the gear stick down into Reverse. The transmission made its familiar clanking noise, Agnes felt the bump of the car into gear, and Lura placed both gloved hands on the wheel and peered into the rearview mirror as she began her journey out of her driveway. Obliquely, and true to her lights, she leaned the Impala’s right fender into her pink azaleas, and the thin and agonized atonal chorus of stems against paint and metal began.

“Oh, Lord,” Agnes muttered. “Here we go.”

Clank clank, into Drive, Lura pulled forward. Clank clank, into Reverse.

“Lura,” Agnes said. “Lura.” Lura pressed on the brake pedal and looked at her.

“Why don’t you use the side mirror,” Agnes said.

Lura looked at her blankly.

“If you just keep your left fender close to the bushes on that side, you’ll be all right,” Agnes said.

Lura said, “I couldn’t see the rest of the car if I did that.”

“You don’t have to see the whole car,” Agnes said. “Can you see the whole car when you’re moving ahead? If you keep it close to the bushes on your side, the other side will take care of itself.”

“I do all right,” Lura said. “Well, I can’t use the side mirror, I never have.”

“Lura, it’s just easier,” Agnes started to say, but Lura’s toe had strayed from the brake pedal and the car’s high idle propelled them backwards. Agnes, looking into the mirror on her side, thought for a moment that they would make it clear out of the driveway and into the street by accident, but then Lura realized what was happening and yanked the wheel, and the car jumped the curb and plowed into the bank of azaleas with a paint-rending screech. Lura kept one hand on the gearshift, pulled the stick clank clank into Drive, and the car shot forward into the driveway and jerked to a stop.

“Look at that,” Lura said, disgusted. “Agnes, will you just let me drive?”

In the end, Agnes got out and waited on the sidewalk until Lura had gotten the car into the street. Then she got in and they drove at Lura’s steady fifteen-miles-per-hour pace to the pool.

Lura took a couple of spaces near the gate, put the broad straw garden hat back onto her head, and they walked on in.

“Well, here we are,” Lura said. “You go on in. I’ll just find somewhere to sit down.”

“I’m going to get some sun before I swim,” Agnes said. “Why don’t you sit over there under that awning and get yourself some ice tea? I’ll take one of those loungers over there and stretch out.”

“Well, that sounds good,” Lura said. “I don’t see how you can stand that sun. I’m glad I wore my hat. Whew.” She adjusted the hat and began working her fingers out of the white cotton gloves as she made her way over to the refreshment area.

Agnes walked down to the deck behind the diving boards, spread her Panama City Beach beach towel onto one of the cedar chaise longues, and eased herself down. This was the last time she’d ever go anywhere with Lura. Lord, what an old biddy. She decided not to fool with the suntan lotion. She hoped Lura wouldn’t wander off and strand her, or worse yet totter off and fall into the pool and drown. She decided to alert the lifeguard to that possibility. He was a strong-looking boy and very capable, she was sure. She looked at him, sitting up in his high chair, twirling his silver whistle.

She got up and went over to the chair.

“Young man?” she said.

The lifeguard looked down at her. He wore black sunglasses and she couldn’t see his eyes.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Would you keep an eye on that elderly lady over at the refreshment stand? I’m afraid she might wander off and fall into the pool.”

The lifeguard looked down at her for a moment, then over in Lura’s direction.

“The lady with the big hat and the sunglasses, ma’am?”

Agnes looked and saw that Lura had pulled out her pair of giant, squared geriatric sunglasses and put them on.

“That’s her,” she said.

“Yes’m,” the lifeguard said, “I’ll keep an eye on her.”

She looked up at him a moment longer as he put the silver whistle to his lips and blew two short notes, like a songbird’s call, and nodded to some action out in the pool. He looked like a Greek god on the mount, like Neptune.

“I thank you,” Agnes said, and went back to her lounge chair. Students from the college lay on their towels along the pool’s edge. It was very hot, and every now and then one of the girls got up and stepped down the pool ladder into the water, holding her hair up on top of her head, until the water touched the back of her neck, then climbed out of the water, still holding her hair. Some girls liked to wet their heads, arching their necks back and lowering their long straight hair into the pool. The boys behind their dark glasses watched the girls lower themselves into the pool and emerge with water sparkling on their oiled bodies, then watched them walk to their towels again.

Agnes watched them all. They were all very nearly naked and all brown as the glazed doughnuts Pops used to bring home from Shipley’s on Sunday mornings after his early drive to smoke his Sunday cigar. She thought about the students having sex, she knew they all did these days, and wondered if they had to get to know one another before they did it or if they just did it casual as dogs, without a thought. She remembered the taste of the hot soft doughnuts Pops would bring home and it made her so restless she sat up straight in the lounge chair.

Lura was still in the shade at the refreshment stand, fanning herself with a magazine. Agnes got up and eased herself over the pool’s edge, let go, and sank to the bottom.

The water sent a great shock of cool through her body. She felt immersed in a great big glass of ice water. She looked around. Everything was green and bright. Way off down at the other end someone dove in and swam across, just thrashing arms and legs. She could see the legs of children dancing around at the shallow end. A cloud sailed over, made all jumpy by the waves. She could see people walk along the pool’s edge, their bodies broken into pieces and quivering like Jell-O. The legs and bottom and shoulders and one arm of a girl came slowly down the ladder and slowly climbed back out, jerking like something big outside the water was taking her bite by bite. Agnes felt fine not breathing, as if there was a great supply of air in her lungs. She’d always had wonderful lung capacity. At some point, she thought, it seemed like a body would simply stop needing to take in so much air, stop needing to breathe all the time. Another girl came partially down the ladder, dipped her long hair back into the pool, and then walked back up into the air. Agnes felt as if they all belonged to another world, too thin and insubstantial to sustain her, and the one she was in, her world here deep in the clear green water, was much more pleasurable, much more peaceful. She remembered a dream, swimming in the ocean in a vast school of swift metallic fish, their eyes all around her, the feeling she got eye to eye with the fishes, and their effortless speed and flashing tails. She felt something stir in her, growing, until she felt filled with it. Her chest ached with it. Saturday nights, Pops would cook their meals. He loved to fry fish. Take Bob out to the lake and get on a bream bed. Pops would come home with a stringer, a mess, wet fish flopping and mouths groping for air. Made her chest ache, watching them. Pops would clean the bream out back, throw Bob a fish head. Bob tossing fish heads around the yard like balls. She was on the brink of a wonderful vision, as if in a moment she would know what Pops had seen as he passed through his own heart and a pile of washed foundry sand into the next world.

She thought she heard the distant trill of a bird and looked up as a crash of bubbles shot down from the surface. The bubbles cleared and she saw it was the lifeguard, his dark and curly hair about his face like a nest of water serpents. His eyes were a clear blue revelation, open wide and upon her. She held out her arms. He came forward and held her and pulled her gently upward. Her hands felt the muscles moving powerfully along his back. She thought that he must have wings, this angel, and he would take her on some beautiful journey.

AGNES LAY IN HER LAWN CHAIR, WATCHING THE LAST RAYS of the afternoon sift through tiny gaps between the leaves. The light shifted in an almost kaleidoscopic fashion as the leaves trembled in a breeze that seemed an augury of the evening. She did not fear them, the passing of the day nor the coming of the evening. She had never felt so relaxed or open to the world around her.

On the way home, Lura’s words had been as distant and melodic as a birdsong. The drive had taken only seconds. Lura must have been driving all of thirty-five.

She heard Lura now, as she leaned over Agnes’s lawn chair to look at her.

“I imagine you’ve had enough sun,” Lura said. “You’re addled. I’m lucky I’m not dead of a heart attack, you nearly scared me to death.”

Bob ran full-speed in broad circles around the yard just inside the fence. He stopped and stood rigid beside the monkey grass patch beneath the pecan tree, then leaped stiff-legged into the middle of it. He thrashed around and came tearing out of it as if something were after him. A few feet away he stopped, turned around, and barked at it.

“Be quiet, Bob,” Agnes said. Bob looked back at her, as if measuring her authority.

“You ought to let me take you to the doctor, anyway,” Lura said. “You nearly drowned.”

“I was all right.”

“I don’t know how you can say that. That boy had to pull you out of the water like an old log.” She touched her hair. “I’ve left my hat.”

“Lura, just sit down and be quiet or go home. I’m feeling so peaceful.”

“You’ve had a near-death experience,” Lura said.

“Oh, be quiet,” Agnes said. Lura touched her hair again, started to say something, then sat down in a lawn chair, and Agnes again turned her attention to the sunset coloring the light behind the trees. The light deepened and the breeze ran through the leaves like the passing of a gentle hand. Agnes didn’t know when she had felt so much at peace. It had not been her time to go. But she had been close enough to see into that moment, and she did not dislike what she had seen.

The bank of orange clouds behind and above the treeline began to fade into slate against the deepening blue of the sky. The loud and raucous birds of the day had retreated, and the quiet of evening began to settle in. The light faded measurably, moment by moment. It was so beautiful she did not think she was not seeing it with two eyes. She heard Bob and looked for him against the purpling green of the lawn and the shrubbery. He’d begun again his racing around and around. He’d worn a narrow path in the grass, a perfect oval like a racetrack. She found him, a speeding, blurred ball of black and white led by a wild and wide-open eye, and watched as he zipped past and approached the far fence. And then, in violation of what had seemed a perfect order, he suddenly leaped. He leaped amazingly high, and with great velocity. He leaped, as if launched by a giant invisible spring in the grass, or shot from a circus cannon, and sailed over the fence into the gathering darkness.

“My goodness,” Lura said.

Agnes was stunned. In the empty space where a few seconds ago Bob had been pure energy in motion, had sped like a comet in his orbit, everything was still.

“Are you going to go get him?” Lura said.

After a moment Agnes said, “I imagine so,” thinking, Now why did he have to go and do that, but not really feeling all that disturbed, as if nothing could very much disturb her peace.

“You want me to drive you?”

“No,” Agnes said. “He won’t go far.”

“It’s getting dark.”

“I can see in the dark as well as anyone.”

“Well, I didn’t mean anything. I just thought I’d offer to help.”

“Go on home and get some rest, Lura. You’ve been through enough for one day.”

She left Lura in the yard and went inside to pull on a pair of slacks and a blouse. She hesitated, then from the kitchen beside the refrigerator she got the nightstick Pops always used to carry in his car. She tapped it into her palm. “Damn old dog,” she said.

She walked all the way down the street to the thoroughfare, calling, then crossed and turned into an older neighborhood with houses hidden in big heavy-limbed trees. The sidewalk was made of old buckled bricks. Dead downtown was a few blocks away, the air above it all blue and foggy with streetlamp glow. It looked underwater. She picked her way along the uneven brick path, the dry sound of roaches scurrying away from her flip-flops.

The old trees towering over her head were so thick with leaves they were spooky. Agnes harked back to fairy tales heard in her childhood and imagined that she was a child walking in a forest where someone had long ago cut the narrow rumbly streets along old trails. Big roots hunched up through the crumbly pavement, and here and there a cozy house was nestled deep in amongst the trees like a forest cottage.

She and Pops were married forty-nine years. Sometimes it seemed like the whole thing actually took place, and then sometimes it didn’t, as if there was a big blank between when she was a little girl and now. She was only twenty-one when they married. She remembered their honeymoon at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear. They’d walked those old paths draped with that moss like damp shadowy lace. In the room their love was quick and startling, their bodies drawn into it like a child’s arm drawn briefly into a hard and painful little muscle.

Agnes slowed her steps as her heart sped up. She remembered kissing Pops in the late years and how it was just pinched-up lips and a dry peck, and remembered kissing him like that in his box, how his lips were like wood and how horrified she’d been. She’d had that craving for a child, briefly, a little bit late, and had not pressed it with Pops. He’d not had word one on the subject. He seemed at times such a passive man, and then at others all pent up. If he’d had passions, she suspected he disapproved of their expression. Perhaps he told them to Bob in the intimacy between a man and his dog, who knows what a man told his dog? He’d always had Bob. There were two other dogs before him, but they were the same kind of dog, looked exactly the same. Every one named Bob. She wondered if he’d have done the same with her if she’d died, just gone out and got another Agnes. If there hadn’t been Bob, maybe he’d have talked to her. Seemed like they had the same dog for forty-nine years. One would die, Pops would get another one just like it the next day. Seemed to have the same obnoxious personality. She’d sometimes catch herself looking at that dog, or one of them, and thinking, This is the longest-living dog I ever saw. She laughed out loud.

She rounded a comer and looked down a narrow street lighted dimly by the old streetlamps. Far down, a little dog stood still in the middle of the road. From what Agnes could make out, it looked like Bob. He seemed to be looking back at her.

She leaned forward, squinting her good eye.

The dog stood very still, looking at her.

“Bob,” Agnes said. Then she called out, “Bob! Come here, boy! Oh Bob!”

She moved a little closer. Bob tensed up, stiffened his legs and his neck. Otherwise, he didn’t budge.

Agnes clucked to herself and tapped the nightstick into her palm. “Damn old dog. I ought to let him run off somewhere.

“Go on!” she called to him then. “Go on, if you want to.”

Bob took a little straightening step. He lifted his head and sniffed the breeze. He was poised there, under the streetlamp, looking proud and aloof, seeming in that foggy distance like the ghost of all the Bobs. She imagined that after fifty years he was asking himself if he wanted any more. Well, she thought, she wouldn’t press it: she would let him go where he wanted to go.

She heard a car and looked around. There at the stop sign sat Lura’s Impala, like some big pale fish paused on the ocean floor, the headlights its soft glowing eyes seeking. It nosed around the comer headed her way. At that Bob turned and trotted away. She watched him fade into the foggy gloom, just the hint of a sidling slip in his gait. Go on and look around then, she said to herself. Go see what you’ve been sniffing in the breeze. She couldn’t see him then, his image snuffed in the fog.

She stood in the middle of the old quiet street and waited on Lura to pull up. On a lark she turned sideways and stuck out her thumb. The car eased up beside her. She opened the creaky old door and looked in. Lura appeared to be dressed for traveling.

“I got an idea,” Agnes said.

At Lura’s pace they reached the coast about dawn. They took the long winding road out to the fort, hung a left at the guardhouse, and went down to the beach. Lura, woozy with fatigue, rolled on off the blacktop and into the sand for several yards before the Impala bogged down. She took the gearshift in one white-gloved hand and pushed it up into Park, pushed the headlights knob to the dash, and shut off the engine. Gulls and wader birds called across the marsh. The sky was lightening into blue. Frogs and more birds began to call, and redwings clung to stalks of swaying sea oats.

“Listen to the morning,” Lura said.

And Agnes closed both eyes to sleep as the molten sun boiled up, cyclopic, from the water.