Last Days of the Dog-Men

A RETREAT

I HAD MY GEAR ALL PACKED WHEN IVAN KNOCKED. A group of us was going down to his family’s farm on the Louisiana line. He came in, wearing his down vest and hunting boots, smoking a Marlboro in the side of his mouth, one eye squinted against the smoke.

“Ready?” he said.

“Yeah. Who’s riding with us?”

“Just you and me, in the pickup.”

I thought maybe the others had already gone on down in Ivan and MaeRose’s Caddy, a 1972 Seville, powder blue. I looked at him and he shrugged.

“What?” I said.

So then he told me, blurting it out in about two sentences, this huge story: He and Eve had been having an affair, she told Dave about it last night, and Dave called up MaeRose and told her.

Jesus Christ.

“It’s been going on awhile, she couldn’t stand it anymore,” Ivan said. He looked at me, then looked away. “Look, I’ll make a confession. We’ve been meeting each other here in your place the last couple of months. I don’t know, maybe longer.”

“Here?” I couldn’t believe it. I’d loaned Ivan a key so he could use my computer while I was at school. Or so he’d said.

“In my bed?” I said.

“In the bed, yeah.” He patted the sofa cushion. “On the couch. On the floor, on that rug there. Out on the screened porch. In the car, one day, down by the bamboo, when you were home.”

I went to the window and looked down there.

“I didn’t see you.”

Ivan stood up and went into the bathroom, dropped his cigarette into the toilet, took a piss, flushed. He came back out and sat down on the sofa. “The fact is, I’m going to need a place to stay for a while. MaeRose asked me not to come back until she leaves. She’s gonna stay with her parents for a while.”

“Will you try to work it out?”

He shook his head, looked at his watch.

“She’s filing for divorce right about now, I imagine.” He lit another cigarette. “You know, she hasn’t been exactly immaculate, herself.”

I didn’t know anything about it. Ivan got up to go into the kitchen. He rummaged in the cabinet for the bourbon, found my bottle of Ezra, pulled the cork and took a swig, corked it, and put it back into the cabinet. He came back into the living room. He was looking around at the walls, as if there was something missing, a painting or a window or something.

“So, you still want to go?” he said. “I’m going. I got to get away until this all calms down a little bit.”

I stood in the living room trying to comprehend it all. You think you know what’s going on around you, what your friends are up to, and then they turn out to have these secret lives. I couldn’t believe he and Eve had been fucking in my bed. When was the last time I’d gotten laid in that bed? As a matter of fact, I myself had fantasized about Eve in that bed, because she’d flirted with me at a party. In fact, she’d flirted with me in front of Dave, and I’d wondered what the hell she was up to. Another time, during a party at their house, Eve and I had been in her study, talking. Dave opened the side door, from the bathroom, stuck his head in, glared at us, then pulled his head out and slammed the door. So, yeah, I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what. I wondered what the hell she was up to.

Fucking Ivan the whole time. I was a little depressed by the news. I’d been depressed in general for something like five or six years. This little setback, of course, was different. Nothing like the real thing. But it all adds up. I’d gone back to school, and I was hanging in there but not too well. I hadn’t gone in with a plan. I’d tried moving in with a buddy of mine and that didn’t work, I couldn’t suppress my desire to hole up, hide. I’d moved into this apartment when the old fellow living here died, he’d been holed up chainsmoking in it for twenty years. He was a retired professor of mathematics, a recluse who’d scrawled his last message on a scrap of notebook paper in shaky pencil: “Gone out — be back in a few minutes.” And then he didn’t go out, he took an overdose of pills and went to bed and died. A friend of mine who lived across the hall from him, in the habit of checking on him, found his body and called the police. She was shaken as she showed me around the next day. We found his note and a large half-empty bottle of phenobarbital. One thin dark suit clung to a closet hanger as if to a frame of old bones. Nothing at all in the chest of drawers. Not a morsel of food in the apartment. No roaches. No reason for them to hang around. He lived off cigarettes and coffee and barbiturates.

I moved in and scrubbed streaks of tobacco smoke residue off all the woodwork with Formula 409. The stove was dusty but otherwise clean. The refrigerator was empty except for a two-month-old carton of half-and-half stuck to the shelf. I stripped up the old stained indoor-outdoor carpet from the floors and sanded the wood down to reveal a beautiful blond oak. I rubbed in Johnson’s Wax with my hands, buffed it with a rented machine, and then I lay out in the middle of the empty, polished expanse of narrow oak boards, my eye to the floor, each board like a golden lane leaping up and away down a gleaming runway. I marveled at the almost tactile sense of starting over, the clarity of vision, the simplicity and beauty of the big open room. From where I lay, the windows looked out upon open sky, a great big protective bubble of opportunity. I’d gone back to school to make something of my life, I could do anything in the world. I’d concentrate and get it done. But within two weeks all the bad stuff had seeped back in. The staying home and skipping classes, the looking out windows at people in cars at the stoplight, at people walking by on the sidewalk, at people on the sidewalk stopped to talk, at people who glanced up and saw me watching them, spoke to one another, and then looked up as I stood there looking back. Strangers.

I figured the old professor probably had a pretty good life when he was about my age, and this unnerved me. I wished I’d kept his phenobarbital, just to keep myself calm. I’ve never had the slightest leaning toward suicide. I always think if I can wait it out, things will change. I wondered how long the old professor had felt that way.

“What about it, Jack?” Ivan said. “We going?”

I thought about it, and said, “Sure.”

“Don’t get so excited,” he said.

“I was just thinking about things.”

“You’re in no shape to do that,” he said. I had to laugh, a little anyway. I picked up my bags and we went downstairs. It was one of those cold and windy, drizzly days and we hurried across the yard. Ivan’s truck had a camper shell over the bed, and I tossed my stuff in there next to his young retriever, Mary, who stood there with her head ducked, wagging her tail. There were sliding windows from there to the cab, and Mary stuck her head through and let her tongue drip onto the seat between us as we got settled and strapped on the seat belts.

I said, “So you get Mary?”

“Sure,” Ivan said. “That’s an old trick. They leave you with all the stuff, even the animals, and you can’t get rid of them or don’t want to, and you’ve got all this shit reminding you of how you fucked up, and these dogs or cats or squawking parakeets or whatever reminding you of everything you did together, and so when they’ve gone they’ve cut themselves completely loose, no strings, clean slate. You’ve got all the baggage. Next time you see them, they’ve lost weight and cut their hair and feel just great about themselves, got their teeth cleaned, stopped biting their nails. They’ve got the soul of a bluebird. You realize they were absolutely miserable with you all along.”

Ivan passed me a little skinny he’d rolled up earlier. I lit it, poured myself a cup of coffee from his heavy green thermos, and we pulled out, rolling past the thick stand of bamboo that rose up tall beside the old Victorian apartment house, the sharp-leaved tops tossing in the wind. They were as tall as the eaves and their leaves brushed against my screened porch. The blackbirds and grackles that had ventured from that protective thicket were already returning in little squadrons of threes and fours. As we turned onto the boulevard to the highway, I rolled down my window and let out a whoop, just like a kid. Ivan looked at me and laughed. We knew this retreat would be a success.

WE WERE STILL UNDER THE COLD AND MISTY FRONT WHEN we crossed the cattle guard into the farm, and we unloaded our gear in a hurry and took it into the farmhouse and built a fire to take the chill out of the room. I put my hands on the old plaster walls. They were as cold as the truck’s windows had been out on the road.

In a little while, the great room felt drier and warmer. We had a cup of thick chicory coffee and stood in front of the fire, then pulled on our jackets and boots and got the guns, coaxed young Mary away from the rug in front of the fire — she didn’t want to get up, kept her chin flat on the rug with her big brown eyes looking up at us, hoping we’d leave her alone— and headed out to walk the fenceline.

There’s something fine about walking a fenceline through wet fields in a steady, misting rain when you’re all wrapped up against it. The world is reaching saturation, the air is uniformly cool and wet. It wraps around you like your heavy clothing and feels close and somehow invigorating. I don’t know. I guess it has the opposite effect on some people, but it strikes a chord in me. You slop through the muddy fields and get a little numb with it and something inside of you lets go a little bit. There’s nothing else like it. Walking in the cold and dry is fine, too, but it’s not the same thing. Walking in the rain loosens up the bad things inside. You feel good, your heart is big enough for any sorrow. You’re walking, slogging, and you’re feeling strong. The dog’s trotting here and there, aimless, nosing around, stumbling onto wet coveys and then leaping like a fool dog when they burst past her. No one’s critical. You take an occasional shot at a bird, bag a couple, just enough to make dinner’s rice interesting. No big take. No worry. No desire for more than you need. It’s a walk as much as a hunt. We didn’t talk about the women. We didn’t say anything much.

We walked all over that thousand acres. The trees bordering the far ends of the pastures looked more like the ghosts of trees in the gray mist. We’d bagged a few quail along the fencelines and beside the creek. Way over by the hay rolls on the north rise we flushed some birds that flew into a low, dense grove of miscellaneous hardwoods. We spread out and walked through the grove, taking shots when the birds flushed, one here, two there, missing. There were still leaves, black and wet, along the gnarled branches that twisted from the short, stout trunks. The birds weaved in short bursts of flight, staying just out of range. At the far end of the grove we stopped and had a smoke.

We stood and smoked, not talking, and then Ivan caught my eye and nodded at something on the ground a few feet ahead. It was a rabbit, a young cottontail, sitting as still as could be. But when we saw it, young Mary saw it, and she leapt.

The rabbit dashed from the edge of the grove and into the adjoining pasture. Instinctively we shot, hobbling it just as it topped a little hummock, and then Mary zoomed over after it and disappeared. We heard a small, high scream, and then a crunching sound that carried with remarkable clarity in the wet, chilly air. It was an awful sound. Mary came trotting back up over the hummock with the rabbit hanging limp by its head from her jaws. She stepped back through the fence, sat down in the grass a few feet away from us, and started licking the rabbit’s fur.

“Christ,” Ivan said. “It’s just a little thing. It’s not even a rabbit. It’s a bunny.”

I felt pretty bad about shooting it, too. Mary had begun to toss the rabbit up into the air. Ivan shook his head.

“Hey,” he said to Mary. “Hey!” He took the rabbit from her and she leapt up into the air after it, playing.

“Leave it,” Ivan said. “Sit.” She looked at him, cocked her head. “Sit!” She sat and looked away, out into the field where she’d caught up with the rabbit.

Ivan put the rabbit into his jacket’s pouch, and we walked back to the house, Mary sniffing at Ivan’s jacket and pawing at the backs of his legs. We flushed a few birds on the way but didn’t take a shot. When we reached the house we followed the gravel drive around back and walked to the bridge over the creek. We took out the five birds and the rabbit and set them on the bridge timbers next to the railing, blocking Mary out with our arms. She stuffed her snout beneath Ivan’s armpit and stayed there for a moment, her nostrils working.

“What are we going to do with the rabbit?” I said.

“I guess we’ll clean it,” Ivan said. “We may as well eat it. We might as well eat our little rabbit brother.”

“I don’t really want to clean it,” I said.

Ivan gave me the birds and said he’d clean the rabbit. As I cleaned the birds I dropped the feathers and entrails and the heads into the creek and watched them float downstream. Ivan dumped the rabbit’s viscera into the stream, too, so Mary wouldn’t get into it. He tacked the skin high on a broken branch, and Mary sat beneath it looking up, not knowing whether to jump at it or not. She rose and sat and rose and sat, restlessly. Ivan came up behind me and stuck something into my back pocket. It was one of the rabbit’s feet. I pulled it out and looked.

“Pretty grisly,” I said.

“Unlucky rabbit,” Ivan said. “He takes on all your bad luck for you now.”

“Okay.” I tucked the foot into the fob pocket of my jeans.

WE WENT IN AND PULLED OFF OUR BOOTS, STOKED THE coals in the hearth and added wood, and poured a little whiskey while we sat in front of the fire drying our socks and pants leggings. We had a couple of stiff bourbons. Then we went into the kitchen to put together a meal. Ivan took the rabbit out of the refrigerator and we looked at it. Maybe it was the old anatomy charts in school that showed the muscle, the elliptical bands of sinew overlapping one other, symmetrically joined. I couldn’t stand to look at it.

“It looks human,” I said.

Ivan looked at me, then set the rabbit on the counter and studied it.

“Christ,” he said. “You fucker. Enough about the rabbit.”

He laughed. We both laughed so hard we had to set our drinks down and lean against the counter and wheeze it off.

“I don’t know how to cook it,” he said. “Let’s just put it on the fire. There’s a spit in there.”

He took the rabbit into the living room and pushed the spit through it and placed the ends of the spit into the cradles. I went back into the kitchen to whip up something for the quail. I don’t have the same kind of problem with birds. It’s all those grocery store fryers, I guess. Conditioning. I wrapped the quail in bacon and set them in a dish of rice and mushrooms and chopped green onions and slid them into the oven, and dropped some fresh green beans into the steamer. I’d come back in and turn them on last.

We sipped the whiskey and dried our socks and every few minutes one of us got up to turn the rabbit. After a while it began to lighten and then to brown. Mary lay on the carpet and watched it with us.

Pretty soon I was more relaxed than I had been in over a year. Outside the tall windows that looked out back in the dusk, great flocks of birds flowed in a fluctuating stream across the sky. I thought of how the redwing blackbirds and grackles gathered mornings and evenings in the bamboo thicket outside my screened porch. I have sat there and watched them, as evening ticked down, swoop in twos, threes, fours, and disappear into the bamboo until the whole thicket was alive with birds hidden by the bamboo leaves, invisible birds, the noise like a thousand old doors swinging on rusty, creaking hinges. In the mornings as they wake they take it up again, and burst from the thicket in bunches. It makes for some pretty strange dreams.

Sometimes in the dawn hour, the birds get so loud they wake me up and I lie there surrounded by their weird cacophonous voices, thinking about the Great Fuckup, and imagining all their beady little eyes darting around in that jungle green like all my quirky little demons. I’d married so young and didn’t know anything about it, and lost my wife and baby son when I was twenty-one years old, let them go with a kind of despair I could not begin to even recognize. It was true I didn’t love her at all. But it was just like Ivan had joked as we’d left that morning: she left the furniture, the silverware, the pots and pans, the television, the books, the carpet, the food, the car, her prescription medicines, her shower cap, shampoo, toothbrush, hairbrush, stuffed animals collection, inessential clothing, old letters and postcards, sheets and towels, cheap framed prints on the walls, stereo, and all the photo albums except the one devoted to our little boy. And she took him. And over the next few years things had shut down inside me with the regularity of lights in an empty warehouse where a night watchman is pulling the switches one by one. I moved around, went back to school, moved in with a friend and then moved out again, into the old man’s empty apartment. And finally one morning that spring I lay there awake, the small bedroom full of the blackbirds’ strange and beautifully dissonant warbling, and couldn’t think of what I really cared about anymore.

I said to Ivan, “Did you ever fuck Eve while those blackbirds were all out there in the bamboo?”

He poked at the fire a minute.

“What, when they’re all out there raising hell? It’s like fucking in the middle of a goddamn asylum,” he said. “You don’t know where you are when it’s over.”

I said, “In my bed.”

He laughed.

I said, “What are y’all going to do?”

He didn’t say anything, and tossed another split log onto the fire.

“I don’t know,” he said then. “It’s not going to be much fun for a while.”

“I don’t think I could ever do it again,” I said. “Go through a divorce. I don’t think I’d ever divorce again, at least not with children.”

“Then don’t remarry,” Ivan said.

“At least you don’t have children.”

We left the rabbit over the coals while we ate the quail, rice, and green beans. It was quiet in the room and warm. Ivan held up a glass of wine. I held mine up.

“Well,” he said, “fuck all of them, Jack. You know?”

“Fuck them each and every one,” I said, and had to shut my mouth and look away. I got up and went into the living room to the fire, put oven mittens on my hands, and lifted the spit with the rabbit out of its cradles. That took a little while. I carried it back into the dining room and laid it across the plate with the birds. Cooked, the rabbit wasn’t as disturbing to me. But the meat was tough and gamy.

“Should’ve at least put a little butter and salt and pepper on it,” Ivan said.

“I wish we hadn’t shot it,” I said.

“Enough about that!” Ivan said. “We’ll give it to Mary.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Mary killed it. She finished it off.”

“In innocence.”

“Exactly. It’s Mary’s rabbit.”

“Okay.”

We gave it to Mary. She trotted back into the living room and lay down in front of the fire with the rabbit under her front paws and began to eat it almost delicately, sniffing it and licking it as if it were her pup and she were eating it almost lovingly in maternal wonder. But when she began to crunch on the bones we sent her outside.

WE GOT UP LATE, WALKED THE FIELDS THE NEXT DAY. ON the evening before we left I went out by myself to walk the fencelines in the fields behind the house. Dusk settled in. I had the little rabbit’s foot in my pocket. The drizzling rain had stopped and things were very quiet. I walked down a narrow corridor made by a row of young pines set out from the edge of a thicket. I could hardly see, with dark advancing, but I spooked a single dove from one of the pines and as he flew away down the corridor against the darkening sky, I took a shot. It must have been low, confusing him, because he turned in a sort of abrupt Immelmann and headed straight back down the corridor at me. I leveled the gun and shot, but missed again — I forgot to aim high — and he darted out of the corridor and across the field.

I could hear the last shot echo over field after field, and then a great silence. A strange ecstasy sang in my veins like a drug. I raised the gun and fired the last shell into the air, the flame from the barrel against the darkening sky, and the chamber locked open, empty. Then silence. Not even a sifting of wind in the leaves. Not a single wheezy note from a blackbird, or any other kind of bird. I wanted the moment to last forever.