The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Brad Watson Kindred Spirits from Last Days of the Dog-Men

On the long green lawn that led down to the lake, Bailey’s boy tumbled with their two chocolate Labs, Buddy and Junior. The seven of us sat on Bailey’s veranda sipping bourbon and watching the boy and his dogs, watching partly because of what Bailey had just told us about the younger dog. Buddy’s progeny, a fat brute and a bully. Bailey had chosen Buddy’s mate carefully, but the union had produced a pure idiot. A little genetic imbalance, Bailey said, hard to avoid with these popular breeds.

Watching Junior you could see that this dog was aggressively stupid. A reckless, lumbering beast with no light in his eyes, floundering onto old Buddy’s back, slamming into the boy and knocking him down. The boy is about ten or eleven and named Ulysses though they call him Lee (sort of a joke), thin as a tenpenny nail, with spectacles like his mama. He was eating it up, rolling in the grass and laughing like a lord-god woodpecker. Junior rooting at him like a hog.

“I hate that dog,” Bailey said. “But Lee won’t let me get rid of him.”

The slow motions of cumulus splayed light across the lawn and lake in soft golden spars, the effect upon me narcotic. My weight pressed into the Adirondack chair as if I were paralyzed from the chest down. Bailey planned this place to be like an old-fashioned lake house, long and low with a railed porch all around. Jack McAdams, with us this day, landscaped the slope to the water, then laid St. Augustine around the dogwoods, redbuds, and a thick American beech, its smooth trunk marked with tumorous carvings. Three sycamores and a sweet gum lined the shore down toward the woods. The water’s surface was only slightly disturbed, like the old glass panes Bailey bought and put in his windows.

Russell took our glasses and served us frosty mint juleps from a silver tray. Silent Russell. The color and texture of Cameroon tobacco leaf, wearing his black slacks and white serving jacket. I am curious about him to the point of self-consciousness. I try not to stare, but want to gaze upon his face through a one-sided mirror. I see things in it that may or may not be there and I’m convinced of one thing, this role of the servant is merely that: Russell walks among us as the ghost of a lost civilization.

Bailey says Russell’s family has been with his since the latter’s post-Civil War Brazilian exile, when Bailey’s great-great-grandfather fled to hack a new plantation out of the rain forest. Ten years later he returned with a new fortune and workforce, a band of wild Amazonians that jealous neighbors said he treated like kings. Only Russell’s small clan lingers.

I looked at Russell and nodded to him.

“Russell,” I said.

He looked at me a long moment and nodded his old gray head.

“Yah,” he said, followed in his way with the barely audible “sah.” After he’d handed drinks out all around, he eased back inside the house.

“Russell makes the best goddamn mint julep in the world,” said Bailey, his low voice grumbly in the quiet afternoon, late summer, the first thin traces of fall in the air.

I could see two other men of Russell’s exact coloring working at the barbecue pit down in the grove that led to the boathouse. Russell’s boys. They’d had coals under the meat all night, Bailey said, and now we could see them stripping the seared, smoked pork into galvanized tubs. Beyond them, visible as occasional blurred slashing shadows between the trunks and limbs and leaves of small-growth hardwoods, were Bailey’s penned and compromised wild pigs, deballed and meat sweetening in the lakeside air. He looked to be building up a winter meatstock, product of several hunting trips to the north Florida swamps with Skeet Bagwell and Titus Smith, who were seated next to me on Bailey’s side. It seemed an unusual sport, to catch and castrate violent swine and pen them until their meat mellowed with enforced domesticity, and then to slit their throats. Russell’s boys partially covered the rectangular cooking pit with sheets of roofing tin and carried the tubs of meat around back of the house to the kitchen. Along the veranda we drank our mint juleps — McAdams, Bill Burton, Hoyt Williams. Titus. Skeet. Bailey, and me — arranged in a brief curving line in Bailey’s brand-new Adirondack chairs. Russell came out with more mint juleps, nodded, and slipped away.

“Here’s to love,” Bailey said, raising his silver cup. He smiled as if about to hurt someone. Probably himself. A malignant smile. Here we go, I said to myself, I don’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear his story any more than I wanted to take his case. He’d called the day before and invited me to the barbecue with these men, his best friends, and said he wanted me to represent him “in this business with Maryella.” Bailey, I’d said. I’ve never handled divorces and I don’t intend to change — as criminal as some of those cases may be. I suggested he call Larry Weeks, who’s done very well with big divorce cases in this town. No, Bailey, said, you come on out, come on. We’ll talk about it. I supposed at the time it was because we’ve known each other since the first grade, though in the way of those who live parallel lives without ever really touching.

So here we were. There were no women around, apparently, none of these men’s wives. I began to feel a familiar pain in my heart, as if it were filling with fluid, and it seemed I had to think about breathing in order to breathe. Even what little I knew about Bailey’s problem at the time forced me into places I didn’t want to go. So his wife has left him for his partner, I thought — so what? What else is new in the world? We all know something of that pain, to one degree or another.

Ten years ago I defended a man accused of pushing his brother of f a famous outcropping in the Smoky Mountains in order to get his brother’s inheritance, set for some reason at a percentage much greater than his own. It was an odd case. There’d been several other people at the lookout, where in those days a single rail kept visitors from succumbing to vertigo and tumbling down the craggy face of the cliff. My client’s hand had rested in the small of his brother’s back as they leaned over the railing to look down when the brother — like a fledgling tumbling from the nest, one witness said — pitched over the edge and disappeared.

It was considered an accident until my client’s cousin, who had never liked or trusted him, who in fact claimed he had once dangled her by her wrists from the treehouse behind their grandmother’s home until she agreed to give him her share of their cache of Bazooka bubble gum, hired a private investigator who was able to plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of enough witnesses to bring the case before a grand jury in Knoxville. Incredibly, the guy was indicted for murder one. I thought it so outrageous that when he called I immediately took over his case, even though it meant spending time traveling back and forth across the state line.

I liked the man. While he and I prepared for trial, my wife. Dorothy, and I had him out to dinner a few times and twice even look him to my family’s old shanty on the Gulf Coast for the weekend. He and Dorothy hit it off well. Each was a lover of classical music (Doro had studied piano at the university until she gave up her hope of composing and switched to music history), and he was a tolerable pianist. They discussed the usual figures. Schubert and Brahms and Mozart, etc., as well as names I’d never heard of. They sat at the piano to study a particular phrase. They retired to the den to play old LPs Doro had brought to our marriage but which had gathered dust during the years I’d built my practice, never having had the energy to listen with her after dragging in at near midnight with a satchel full of work for the next morning. I often awoke at one or two in the morning, tie twisted and cinched against my throat, the dregs of a scotch and water in the glass in my lap, while the stereo needle scratched at the label of a recording long done easing strains of Sibelius from its grooves. In the bedroom I’d find Doro turned into the covers, her arms tossed over a pillow that covered her head, as was her sleeping habit, as if she were trying to smother herself.

I can look back now and see things. I pursued her when she didn’t necessarily want to be pursued. The law school was just two blocks from the music school, and I would wander down the boulevard and into the resonant halls of the studios and to the room where she practiced and composed. I would stand outside the door, looking in through the narrow window no wider than half my face, until she looked up, would have to look up, with her dark eyes as open upon mine as an animal’s in the woods when it discovers you standing still and watching it, and it is watching your eyes to see if you are something alive. I did not do this every day, but only when my blood was up too high to sit at the law library desk and, thinking of the last time we had been together, I had to see her. One day when she looked up, I knew that she had not wanted to but for some reason had been unable not to, and when she did look up she knew that was it, she was mine. It was the moment when one is captured by love in spite of one’s misgivings and is lost.

But light bends to greater forces, and so does fate, in time. I should not have been so stricken when she left with my client after the trial, but of course I was. An overweight man who eats bacon, drinks heavily, smokes, and never exercises should expect a heart attack, too, and does, but is nevertheless surprised when it comes and he is certainly stricken. I’d given my all to the case. I’d fought for the man. Work had become my life, after all. I’d exposed the cousin as a bankrupt, scheming bitch, read letters between the brothers that were full of fraternal endearments, and I borrowed and brought into court an expensive, full-size oil copy of Durand’s famous painting. Kindred Spirits, depicting the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Bryant standing on an outcropping in the Catskills, a spot less lofty than the scene of my client’s alleged crime, but more beautiful in its romantic, cloistering light, and I asked them how a brother, in a setting such as this, and with witnesses less than ten feet away, could do something so unnatural as pitch his own flesh and blood to a bloody end. It was a stroke of brilliance. No one sees that painting without being moved to sentimental associations. Rosenbaum, the D.A., was furious I got away with it. My client also had a noble face: a straight nose, strong brow, high forehead, strong jaw and chin, clear brown eyes that declared a forthright nature. But in the end, after the hung jury and the judge’s bitter words, my client and my wife moved to Tennessee, of all places, where he would set himself up in the insurance business. And here is my point, I suppose, or what makes the story worth telling.

When she began to call me three years later, in secret, explaining how he had become a cold and manipulative man, she told me he had admitted to her while drunk that he had indeed pushed his brother off the lookout, and he’d said that only I had any evidence of this, in a statement I’d taken wherein he slipped up and said the one thing that could have convicted him had the D.A. gotten his hands on it. I could hear the ghosted voices of other, garbled conversations drifting into our line. What one thing is that? I said. I don’t know, she said. He wouldn’t tell me. There was a pause on the line, and then she said. You could find it, Paul.

But I have never opened the file to search for the incriminating words. Moreover, although I have acquired an almost tape-recorder memory of the utterances of people in trouble, I have not bothered to prod that little pocket in my brain. I have detoured around it as easily as I swerve around a sawhorsed manhole in the street. I protected my client, as any good attorney would. I’ve moved on.

We walked down into the grove, past the thin smoking curtain of heat at the edge of the pit, its buckled tin, and up to the heavy-gauge wire fencing that surrounded about a half-acre of wooded area bordering the cove. Here there was no grass, and the moist leaves were matted on the rich, grub- and worm-turned earth. Through the rectangular grid of the fencing we saw small pockets of ground broken up as if by the steel blades of a tiller where the pigs had rooted, and slashes and gouges in tree trunks where they’d sharpened their tusks.

I looked over at Bailey swirling the crushed ice in his cup, the righteous tendons in his jaw hardening into lumpy bands of iron. He was seething with his own maudlin story. But before he could start up, we heard a rustling followed by a low grunt, and a wild hog shot out of the undergrowth and charged. We all jumped back but Bailey as the hog skidded to a stop just short of the wire, strangely dainty feet on scraggly legs absurdly spindly beneath its massive head. Its broad shoulders tapered along its mohawkish spinal ridge to the hips of a running back and to its silly poodlish tail. The pig stood there, head lowered, small-eyed, snorting every few breaths or so, watching Bailey from beneath its thick brow. Bailey looked back at the beast, impassive, as if its appearance had eased his mind for a moment. And the boar grew even more still, staring at Bailey.

The spell was broken by the loud clanging of a bell. Russell, clanging the authentic antique triangle for our meal. The pig walked away from us then, indifferent, stiff-legged, as if mounted on little hairy stilts.

We made our way back to the porch. Russell and one of the men who’d been tending the pit came out with a broad tray of meat already sauced, and a woman (no doubt one of Russell’s daughters or granddaughters) came out and set down on the table a stack of heavy plates, a pile of white bread, an iron pot full of baked beans, and we all got up to serve ourselves. When we sat back down. Bill Burton, who’d dug into his food before anybody else, made a noise like someone singing falsetto and looked up, astonished.

“By God, that’s good barbecue,” he said through a mouthful of meat. Burton was a plumbing contractor who’d done the plumbing for Bailey’s house. He said to Skeet Bagwell, “Say you shot this pig?”

“Well,” Skeet said, “let me tell you about that pig.” Like me. Skeet is a lawyer, but we aren’t much alike. He rarely takes a criminal case, but goes for the money, and loves party politics and the country club and hunting trips and all that basically extended fraternity business, never makes a phone call his secretary can make for him, and needless to say he loves to tell big lies. His compadre Titus built shopping malls during the 1980s and doesn’t do much of anything now.

“Titus and I captured that pig,” Skeet said, “down in the Florida swamps. Ain’t that right, Titus?”

“I wouldn’t say, not exactly captured,” Titus said. “In a way, or briefly, perhaps, we captured that pig, but then we killed it. It may be a mite gamy.”

“Unh-uh,” voices managed. “Not a bit!”

Skeet said, “You ain’t had your blood stirred till you crossing a clearing in the swamp and hear a bunch of pigs rooting and grunting, you don’t know where they are, and then you see their shapes, just these big, low, broad, hulking shadows, inside the bushes on the other side, and then they smell you and disappear, just disappear. It’s eerie.” Skeet took a mouthful of the barbecue, sopped up some sauce with a piece of bread, and chewed. We waited on him to swallow, sitting there on the veranda. Down on the lawn the boy, (Ulysses) Lee, ran screaming from the bounding dogs.

Skeet said it was exciting to see the pigs slip out of the woods and light out across a clearing, and the dogs’ absolute joy in headlong pursuit. They were hunting these pigs with the local method, he said. You didn’t shoot them. You used your dogs to capture them.

“We had this dog, part Catahoula Cur — you ever heard of them?”

“State dog of Louisiana,” Hoyt said.

“Looks kind of prehistoric,” Skeet said. “They breed them over in the Catahoula Swamp in Louisiana. Well, this dog was a cross between a (Catahoula Cur and a pit hull, and that’s the best pig dog they is. Like a compact Doberman. They can run like a deer dog and they’re tough and strong as a pit bull. And they got that streak of meanness they need, because a boar is just mean as hell.” Skeet said he’d seen an African boar fight a whole pack of lions on TV one night, did we see that? Lions tore the boar to bits, but he fought the whole time. “I mean you couldn’t hardly see the boar for all the lion asses stuck up in the air over him, tails swishing, ripping him up, twenty lions or more,” Skeet said. They had pieces of him scattered around the savanna in seconds, but there was his old head, tusking blindly even as one of the lions licked at his heart. Skeet took another bite of barbecue and chewed, looking off down the grassy slope at the tussling boy and dogs.

“This dog Titus and I had, we bought him off a fellow down there said he was the best dog he’d ever seen for catching a hog, and he was right.” Titus nodded in agreement. “We got out in the swamp with him, and bim, he was off on a trail, and ran us all over that swamp for about an hour, and never quit until he run down that hog.

“We come up on him out in this little clearing, and he’s got this big old hog by the snout, holding his head down on the ground, hog snorting and grunting and his eyes leaking bile. I mean, that dog had him. But then we come to find out how we got this wonder dog at such a bargain.”

“I had a preacher sell me a blind dog one time,” Hoyt said. “Said how hot he was for a rabbit, and cheap. Sumbitch when I let loose the leash took off flying after a rabbit and run right into an oak tree, knocked hisself cold.”

Everybody laughed at that.

“Preacher said, I never said he wasn’t blind,’” Hoyt said.

“Well, this dog wasn’t blind,” Skeet said, “Not literally, but you might could say he had a blind spot. He would run the hog down, like he’s supposed to do, then take it by the snout and hold its old head down, so you can go up and hog-tie him and take him in. Way they do down there, like Bailey’s doing here, they castrate them and pen them up, let the meal sweeten awhile before they kill ’em.

“But this dog, once you grabbed the hog by the hind legs and begun to tie him, thought his job was done, and he lets go.”

Skeet paused here, looking around at us. “So there was old Titus, gentlemen, playing wheelbarrow with a wild pig that’s trying to twist around and rip his nuts off with one of them tusks. I mean that son of a bitch is mean, eyes all bloodshot, foaming at the mouth. That meat ain’t too tough, is it?”

Everyone mumbled in the negative.

“Ain’t gamy, is it?”

Naw, unh-uh.

“So finally Titus jumped around close to a tree, lets go of the hog, and hops up into it, and I’m already behind one and peeping out, and the hog jabbed his tuskers at the tree Titus was in for a minute and then shot out through the woods again, and the dog — he’d been jumping around and barking and growling and nipping at the hog — took out after him again. So Titus climbed down and we ran after them.”

“Dog was good at catching the hog,” Titus said.

“That’s right,” Skeet said. “Just didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation, once he’d done it. Actually, the way I see it, the dog figured that once the man touched the hog, then he had taken possession of the hog, see, and his job — the dog’s — was over.

“Anyway, you can imagine, Titus wasn’t going near that hog held by that dog again, so one of these fellows we’re with tries it, and the same tiling happens, two more times: As soon as the man touched the hog, the dog let go. And it was starting to get dark. But this fellow, name was Beauregard or something—”

“Beaucarte,” Titus said.

“— he comes up with a plan. And the next time the dog has the hog down, he manages with some kind of knot to hog-tie the hog without actually touching the hog, and the dog’s watching his every move, you know, and looking into his eyes every now and then, thinking, Why the hell ain’t he taking hold of this hog, but he holds on just fine till it’s done. But then when the guy starts to drag the hog over to this pole we go’n carry him out on, the dog — since the man hasn’t actually touched the hog at all with his hands, now — he’s still hanging on, and pulling backwards and growling like a pup holding on to a sock. Damn hog is squawling in pain and starting to buck.”

Skeet stopped here a minute to chow down on his barbecue before it got cold, and we waited on him. Bailey seemed distant, looking out over the lake, sitting still, not eating any barbecue himself.

“So the guy stops and looks back at that dog, and you could see him thinking about it. Just standing there looking at that dog. And we were tired, boy, I mean we’d been running through that damn swamp all day, and we was give out. And I could see the guy thinking about it, thinking all he had to do was reach down and touch that hog one time, and the dog would let go. And you could see the dog looking at him, still chomped down on the hog’s nose, looking up at the guy as if to say. Well, you go’n touch the hog or ain’t you? And that’s when the guy pulls his .44 Redhawk out, cocks it, and blows the son of a bitch away.”

“The hog?” says Jack McAdams, sounding hopeful. Skeet shakes his head.

“The dog,” he says.

“Your dog?” Hoyt says.

“That’s right.” Skeet said. “All in all, I guess he was doing me a favor.”

Everybody stopped eating, looking at Skeet, who finished up the little bit of barbecue on his plate and sopped up the sauce and grease with a piece of white bread. He rattled the ice chips and water in the bottom of his cup and drained the sugar-whiskey water, and I saw Russell note this and slip back into the house for more drinks.

“I guess he let go then,” Bailey said quietly, sunk deeply into his Adirondack. “The dog.”

“No,” Skeet said, “he didn’t.”

“He was a mess, head all blown way, but his jaws still clamped on that nose in a death grip. He was rigor-mortised onto that hog. You can imagine the state of mind of the hog right then, that .44 laid down the ridge of his nose and going boom, shooting blue flame, and that dog’s head opening up, blood and brains and bone all over him, dog teeth clamping down even more on his nose. Hog went crazy. He jumped up and thrashed his head around, screaming in pain, shook the ropes almost free, and started hobbling and belly-crawling around this little clearing we were in. And he was dragging the dog around, flopping it around, and it wadn’t anything now but a set of teeth attached to a carcass, just a body and jaws.

“Meanwhile old Beaucarte’s feet had gotten tangled in the ropes and so there they all were, thrashing around in the near-dark, stinking swamp with a wild hog, a dead dog, and this damn cracker trying to aim his hand-cannon at the hog just to make it all stop, and finally he shot it, the hog. By then it was almost dark, and everything was still as the eye of a hurricane and the air smelled of gunpowder smoke and blood and something strange like sulfur, with the swamp rot and the gore and the sinking feeling we all had with a hunt gone wrong, and a good dog with just one flaw now dead, and everybody felt bad about it, especially this long, skinny Beaucarte.

“We dragged the hog and the dog back to the truck in the dark, tossed them in back and drove on back to the camphouse, and told these two swamp idiots on the porch, a couple of beady-eyed brothers, to take care of the hog, and then we drank some whiskey and went to bed. The next day, when we were leaving, one of the swamp idiots, name was Benny, had this old cheap pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth, brings out a big ice chest full of meal wrapped in butcher paper. And he says, ‘We gain’ on into town, now. Me and Fredrick put yo meat in this icebox, now Daddy’n them took some of the meat from the big'un.’”

Here Skeet stopped talking and let silence hang there a moment and sipped from a fresh drink Russell had set down on the arm of his Adirondack. Hoyt gestured to his plate.

“So you saying this might be hog, might be dog.”

“Tastes mighty sweet to be dog,” Bill Burton said.

“Some of it’s sweeter than the rest,” Skeet allowed.

Everybody had a laugh over that, sitting there picking their teeth with minty toothpick wedges Russell had passed around from a little silver box. He freshened the drinks. The afternoon seemed to slide pleasantly, almost imperceptibly, along the equinoctial groove toward autumn.

“I tell you something,” Bailey said then. “I got a story to tell, too. Skeet’s story brings me to mind of it.”

The immediate shift in mood was as palpable as if someone had walked up and slapped each one of us in the mouth. We sat in our Adirondacks, sunken, silent, and trying to focus on the boy on the lake bank tossing the ball to his dogs swimming the shallows. Holding our breath this wouldn’t be the old epic of Bailey’s yawping grief.

“You know this fellow, my erstwhile friend and partner, Reid Covert.”

“Bailey, ain’t you got any dessert to go with this fine barbecue?” Skeet said.

Bailey held his hand up. “No, now, hear me out,” he said, his eyes fixed somewhere out over the lake. He made a visible effort to relax. “It’s a good story, it’s all in fun.”

All right, someone mumbled, let him tell it.

“But that’s not saying it ain’t true,” Bailey said, and turns to us with such a devilish grin that we’re all a little won over by it. It was a storyteller’s smile. A liar’s smile.

All right, everybody said, easing up, go ahead on.

“Y’all didn’t know a thing about this,” he said, “but I whipped that sorry sapsucker’s ass three times before I finally got rid of him.”

Three times! we said.

“Kicked his ass.”

No! we said. We had fresh mint juleps in our hands. Russell stood to one side in his white serving jacket, looking out over the lake. Out in the yard, the boy chased the Labs down to the water. He had a blue rubber-looking ball in his hand and he stopped at the bank, holding the ball up, and the dogs leaped into the air around him. Junior knocked the boy all over the place, trying to get his chops on the ball. He knocked off the boy’s glasses and then grabbed the ball when the boy got down on his knees to retrieve them.

“The first time I heard about it I went into his office and confronted him.” Bailey said. “He denied it. But, hell, I knew he was lying. It was after five. The nurses had gone, receptionist gone, insurance clerk gone. No patients. I told him, ‘You’re lying, Reid.’ He just sat there then, looking stupid, and I knew I was right. I went over and slapped him. My own partner. Friend since elementary school. Went through med school together. Slapped shit out of him. ‘How long has it been going on?’ I said. He just sat there. I told him to get up but he wouldn’t. So I slapped him again. He still just sat there. I tried to pick him up out of his chair by his shirt but he held on to the goddamn armrests, so I slapped him again. ‘Stop it, Bailey,’ he says then. ‘Stop it, hell,’ I said. I said, ‘Get up, you son of a bitch.’ And he says, ‘Stop it. Bailey.’ And so I said. ‘You son of a bitch. I want you out of this office, you and I are through.’ And I walked out.”

We were all quiet again then. It was as bad as we’d thought it would be. Bailey hadn’t worked in weeks. All his patients had to go to Birmingham. Reid Covert had taken off somewhere, and Bailey’s wife, Maryella, had gone off, too. Everybody figured they were together. And I was thinking, I guess he’ll ask me to help him divide his and Reid’s business, too.

“Well,” Bailey went on then, “Maryella wouldn’t talk to me about it, and I kept hearing they were still seeing each other. So I drove over to his house one day and pulled up as he was trying to leave. I cut off his car with mine, got out, went over, and pulled him out of his goddamn Jeep Cherokee. He didn’t even get the thing into park, it rolled over and ran into a pine tree. And I mean I pummeled him, right there in his own goddamn front yard. Berry, she came out into the yard veiling at me, went back in to call the police, and old Reid. I’m beating the shit out of him, his nose is bloody, and he’s holding out his arm toward Berry and saying. No, don’t call the police. I let go of him and watched him limp after her, then I got back into my car and came out here. When I got here Maryella passed me in the driveway, zooming out onto the road, dust flying. Hell. Berry must’ve called her instead of the cops. Hell, she left Lee out in the goddamn yard with the dogs and went to her mother’s house, didn’t come home for two days, and when she did I had her suitcase packed and told her to get the hell out.”

All this — all the detail, anyway — was new, we had not heard it from the various sources. Lee was throwing the blue ball into the water now and the dogs were swimming out to get it, then swimming back in, whereupon the one without it, usually the boorish Junior, would chase the one who had it. Buddy, and get it away from him. Whereupon the boy would chase down Junior, get the ball, and throw it back out into the lake.

“Look at that,” Bailey said. “I tell you it was Reid’s bitch Lab we mated Buddy with to get that sorry Junior? I should’ve drowned the goddamn dog.”

A couple of us, Hoyt and me, got up for barbecue seconds. Dog or hog, it was good, and Bailey’s story was eating at my stomach in a bad way. I needed something more in it.

“Y’all cat up,” Bailey said. “What’s left belongs to the niggers.” Old Russell, standing off to one side of the barbecue table, sort of shifted his weight and blinked, still looking out over the lake. Bailey saw this and pulled his lips tight over his teeth. “Sorry, Russell,” he mumbled. Russell, his eyes fixed on the lake’s far shore, appeared unfazed. Bailey got up, went inside, and came back out with the bottle of Knob Creek. He poured some into his mint julep cup and drank it.

“Well, finally, I followed him one day, and I watched him meet her in the parking lot of the Yacht Club, and I followed them way out here, down to the Deer Lick landing. I’d cut my lights, and I parked up the road, and then I walked down. I had my .38 pistol with me, but I wasn’t going to kill them. I had me some blanks, and I’d screwed a little sealing wax into that little depression at the end of the blanks. You ever noticed that, that little depression? When I got down there they weren’t in the car. I looked around and saw a couple standing down on the beach, just shadows in that darkness, so I walked down there. They looked around when I walked up to them, and when they realized it was me it scared them pretty bad, me showing up. I stepped up to him and said, ‘I told you to give it up. Reid,’ and that’s when he hit me, almost knocked me down. I guess he wanted to get the first lick in, for once. I went back at him, and it was a real street fight, pulling hair and wrestling and kicking and throwing a punch every now and then, and hell, Maryella might have been in on it for all I know. I finally threw him down onto the sand, and his shirt ripped off in my hands. Maryella was standing with her feet in the water, with her hands over her face, and I was standing there over Reid, out of breath and worn out. And he looked up then and said, ‘You’re going to have to kill me to get rid of me, Bailey. I love her.’ So I pulled out the pistol from my pocket and said, ‘All right.’ And I shot him. All five rounds.”

We were all quiet as ghosts. The squeals from the boy and the playful growling of Junior and the good-natured barking of Buddy all wafted up from the lake. The ball arced out over the water, and the dogs leapt after it with big splashes.

“Well, he hollered like he was dying,” Bailey said. “I imagine it hurt, wax or not, and scared the holy shit out of him. It was loud as hell. I saw these dark blotches blossom on his skin. You know Reid always was a pale motherfucker. When he saw the blood, his head fell back onto the beach sand.

“Maryella said. ‘You killed him.’ By God, I thought I had, too. I thought, Jesus Christ. I am so addled I forgot to use the blanks, I have shot the son of a bitch with real bullets. I jumped down there and took a look, and in a minute I could see that I hadn’t done that. The pieces of wax had pierced the skin, though, and he was bleeding from these superficial wounds. He’d fainted.

“And Maryella panicked then. She started to run away. I tackled her and dragged her back to Reid to show her he was all right, but she wouldn’t quit slapping at me and screaming, ‘You killed him, you killed him!’ over and over again. She said she loved him, and she’d never loved me. I shoved her head under the shallow water there at the beach, but when I pulled her up again she just took a deep breath and started screaming the same thing again, ‘You killed him, I hate you!’ And that’s when Reid jumped onto my back and shoved me forward. I still had a hold on Maryella’s neck, see, and my arms were held out stiff, like this,” and he held his arms out, his hands at the end of them held in a horseshoe shape, the way they would be if they were around a neck. Bailey looked at his hands held out there, like that.

“I felt her neck crack beneath my hands,” he said. “Beneath our weight, mine and Reid’s.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. I heard his boy, Lee, calling him from down at the lake. No one answered him or looked up. We were all staring at Bailey, who wasn’t looking at anything in particular. He looked tired, almost bored.

“Anyway,” he said then, “I couldn’t let Reid get away with causing that to happen. I found the gun and hit him over the head with it. And then I held him under until he drowned.”

Bailey swirled what was left in his mint julep cup, looking down into the dregs. He turned it up and sucked at the bits of ice and mint and the soggy sugar in the bottom. Then he sat back in his chair, poured more bourbon into the cup, and said in a voice that was chilling to me, because I recognized the method of manipulation behind it, taking the shocked imagination and diverting it to the absurd: “So when I brought them back here, that’s when Russell’s boys skinned ’em up and put ’em over the coals.”

There was silence for a long moment, and then McAdams. Bill Burton, Hoyt, Titus, and Skeet broke into a kind of forced, polite laughter.

“Shit, Bailey,” McAdams said. “You just about tell it too good for me.”

“So gimme some more of that human barbecue, Russell,” Titus said.

“‘Long pig’ is the Polynesian term. I believe,” Skeet said.

Their laughter came more easily now.

The boy, Lee, came running up to the porch steps.

“Daddy,” he said. He was crying, his voice high and quailing. Bailey turned his darkened face to the boy as if to an executioner.

“Daddy, Junior’s trying to hurt old Buddy.”

We looked up. Out in the lake, Buddy swam with the ball in his mouth. Junior was trying to climb up onto Buddy’s back. Both dogs looked tired, their heads barely clearing the surface. Junior mounted Buddy from behind, and as he climbed Buddy’s back, the older dog, his nose held straight up and the ball still in his teeth, went under.

He didn’t come back up. We all of us stood up out of our chairs. Junior swam around for a minute. He swam in a circle one way, then reversed himself, and then struck out in another direction with what seemed a renewed vigor, after something. It was the blue ball, floating away. He nabbed it off the surface and swam in. He set the ball down on the bank and shook himself, then looked up toward all of us on the veranda. He started trotting up the bank toward the boy standing stricken in the yard.

Bailey had gone into the house and come out with what looked like an old Browning shotgun. He yanked it to his shoulder, sighted, and fired it just over the boy’s head at the dog. The boy ducked down flat onto the grass. The dog stopped still, in a point, looking at Bailey holding the gun. He was out of effective range.

“Bailey!” Skeet shouted. “You’ll hit the boy!”

Bailey’s face was purplish and puffed with rage. His eyes darted all over the lawn. He saw his boy Lee lying down in the grass with an empty, terrified look in his eyes. He lowered the barrel and drew a bead on the boy. The boy, and I tell you he looked just like his mama, was looking right into his daddy’s eyes. He will never be just a boy again. There was a small strangled noise down in Bailey’s chest, and he swung the gun up over the grove and fired it off, boom, the shot racing out almost visibly over the trees. The.sound caromed across the outer bank and echoed back to us, diminished. Junior took off running for the road, tail between his legs. The boy lay in the grass looking up at his father. Titus stepped up and took the shotgun away, and Bailey sat down on the pinewood floor of the veranda as if exhausted.

“Well,” he said after a minute. His voice was deep and hoarse and croaky. “Well.” He shook with a gentle, silent laughter. “I wonder what I ought to do.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know who else to ask but you boys.” He struggled up and tottered drunkenly to the barbecue table, put together a sandwich of white bread and meat, and began to devour it like a starving man. He snatched large bites and swallowed them whole, then stuck his fingers into his mouth, sucking off the grease and sauce. He gave that up and wiped his hands on his khakis, up and down, as if stropping a razor. “Russell,” he said, looking around, seeming unable to focus on him, “get another round, some of that Mexican beer, maybe. We need something light to wash down this meal.” He ran his fingers through his hair.

Old Russell glided up like a shadow then, taking plates, stacking them in one broad hand, smiling with his mouth but his eyes as empty and blank as the sky, “Heah, sah,” he said, “let me take your plate. Let me help you with that. Let one of my boys bring your car around. Mr. Paul,” he said to me. “I guess you’ll be wanting to stay.”

There was little more to say, after that. We formalized the transfer of deed for the old place in Brazil, along with the title to Bailey’s Winnebago, to Russell. By nightfall he and his clan had eased away on their long journey to the old country, stocked with barbecue and beer and staples. The women left the kitchen agleam. Bailey and I sat by the fire in the den. They’d lain Reid Covert and Maryella on the hickory pyre that, reduced to pure embers, had eventually roasted our afternoon meal. There was nothing much left there to speak of, the coals having worked them down to fine ash in the blackened earth. I could hear a piece of music, though the sound system was hidden, nowhere to be seen. It sounded like Schubert, one of those haunting sonatas that seem made for the end of the day. In his hand Bailey held a little bundle of cloth, a tiny palm-sized knapsack that Russell had given him before he left. A little piece of the liver, sah, to keep the bad souls from haunting your dreams. A little patch of this man’s forehead, who steal his own best friend’s wife. This light sap from her eyes. Mr. Bailey, you hardly see it, where the witch of beauty live in her, them eyes that could not lie to you. You take it, eat, and you don’t be afraid. He eased carefully out the front door and disappeared. Bailey placed the little knapsack on the glowing coals in the hearth, watched the piece of cloth begin to blacken and burn, and the bits of flesh curl and shrink into ash. He was calm now, his boy asleep fully clothed and exhausted up in his room.

In the last moments out on the porch, before we’d drifted inside in a dream of dusk, the afternoon had ticked down and shadows had deepened on the lake’s far bank. The other men, dazed, had shuffled away. Russell’s two younger sons had stood on the shore and tossed ropes with grappling hooks to retrieve old Buddy. Bailey’s boy stood on the bank hugging himself against some chill, watching them swing the books back over their shoulders and sling them, the long ropes trailing out over the lake, where the hooks landed with a little splash of silver water. Л momentarily delayed report reached us, softly percussive, from across the water and the lawn. Bailey stood on the steps and watched them, his hands on top of his head.

“Look at that,” he whispered, the grief and regret of his life in the words. “Old Buddy.”

They brought the old dog out of the water. The boy, Lee, fell to his knees. Russell’s sons stood off to one side like pallbearers. Above the trees across the lake, a sky like torn orange pulp began to fade. Light seeped away as if extracted, and grainy dusk rose up from the earth. For a long while none of us moved. I listened to the dying sounds of birds out over the water and in the trees, and the faint clattering of small sharp tusks against steel fencing out in the grove, a sound that seemed to come from my own heart.