The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Brad Watson Water Dog God

From Oxford American

Back in late May a tornado dropped screaming into the canyon, snapped limbs and whole treetops off, flung squirrels and birds into the black sky. And in the wet and quiet shambles after, several new stray dogs crept into the yard, and upon their heels little Maeve. You’ve seen pictures of those children starving on TV, living in filthy huts and wearing rags and their legs and arms just knobby sticks, huge brown eyes looking up at you. That’s what she looked like.

These strays, I sometimes think there is something their bones are tuned to that draws them here, like the whistle only they can hear, or words of some language ordinary humans have never known — the language that came from Moses’ burning bush, which only Moses could hear. I think sometimes I’ve heard it at dawn, something in the green, smoky air. Who knows what Maeve heard, maybe nothing but a big rip-roaring on the roof: the black sky opens up, she walks out. She follows an old coon dog along the path of forest wreckage through the hollow and into my yard, her belly huge beneath a sleeveless bit of cloth you might call a nightslip.

I knew her as my Uncle Sebastian’s youngest child, who wouldn’t ever go out of her room, and here she was wandering in the woods. They lived up beyond the first dam, some three miles up the creek. She says to me, standing there holding a little stick she’s picked up along the way, “I don’t know where I’m at.” She gives it an absent whack at the hound. He’s a bluetick with teats so saggy I thought him a bitch till I saw his old jalapeño.

I said, “Lift up that skirt and let me see you.” I looked at her white stomach, big as a camel’s hump and bald as my head, stretched veins like a map of the pale blue rivers of the world, rivers to nowhere. I saw her little patch of frazzly hair and sex like a busied lip wanting nothing but to drop the one she carried. Probably no one could bear to see it but God, after what all must have climbed onto her, old Uncle Sebastian and those younger boys of his, the ones still willing to haul pulpwood so he hadn’t kicked them out on their own, akin to these stray dogs lying about the yard, no speech, no intelligent look in their eyes.

This creature in Maeve would be something vile and subhuman.

I said, “The likes of those which have made your child, Maeve, should not be making babies, at least not with you. It was an evil thing that led to it.”

She said, “Well, when the roof lifted off the house and blew away I climbed on out. They was all gone, out hiding or gone to town.”

She took to wearing the little blue earphones radio I got in the mail with my Amoco card. I had no idea what she was listening to. She wandered around looking at nothing, one hand pressing a speaker to an ear, the other aimless, signing. She scarcely ever took them off, not even when she slept. She was quiet before, but now with her head shot through with radio waves she was hardly more than a ghost.

She would never even change out of her nightslip, though when I’d washed it for her it nearly fell apart. She was pale as a grub, hair a wet black rag all pressed to her head. Not even seventeen and small, but she looked old somehow. She’d seen so very little of the world and what she’d seen was scarcely human. She would forget, or just not bother to use, the toilet paper. Climb into the dry bathtub and fall into naps where she twitched like a dreaming dog. She heaved herself somehow up the ladder and through the little hole in the hallway ceiling to sit in the attic listening to her headset until she came down bathed in her own sweat and wheezing from the insulation dust. Maybe the little fibers got into her brain and improved her reception.

I made her put on a raincoat over the nightslip and took her to the grocery store, since I didn’t want to leave her alone. I thought if I took her there she wouldn’t think herself so strange compared with some of the women who lurk those aisles. Town is only three miles away but you would not think it to stand here and look at the steep green walls of the canyon. And what does it matter? The whole world, and maybe others, is in the satellite dish at the edge of the yard, and I have sat with Maeve until three in the morning watching movies, industrial videos, German game shows, Mexican soap operas. It’s what Greta would do sometimes while she was dying, her body sifting little by little into the air. When I started to get the disability and was home all the time I could see this happening, so I wasn’t surprised when one morning I woke and she didn’t. I grieved but I wasn’t surprised. She was all hollowed out. We’d never had a child as she was unable, and near the end I think she believed her life had been for nothing.

I felt the same way about myself after some twenty-odd years at ChemGlo. Sometimes it seems I wasn’t even there in that job, I’d only dreamed up a vision of hell, a world of rusty green and leaky pipes and tanks and noxious fumes. But as I was not there anymore and was not dead, I began to believe or hope my life might have some purpose, though nothing had happened to confirm that until Maeve appeared.

At the grocery store I couldn’t get her away from the produce section. She wouldn’t put on any shoes, and she was standing there in her grimy, flat, skinny bare feet, the gray raincoat buttoned up to her chin, running her dirty little fingers all over the cabbages and carrot bunches, and when the nozzles shot a fine spray over the lettuce she stuck her head in there and turned her face up into the mist. I got her down to the meat and seafood area, where she stood and looked at the lobsters in their tank until I had everything else loaded into the cart, and I lured her to the cashier with a Snickers bar. She stood behind me in the line eating it while I loaded the groceries onto the conveyor belt, chocolate all over her mouth and her fingers, and she sucked on her fingers when she was done. And then she reached over to the candy shelf in the cashier chute and got herself another one, opened it up and bit into it, as if this was a place you came to when you wanted to eat, just walked around in there seeing what you wanted and eating it.

I looked at her a second, then just picked up the whole box of Snickers and put it on the conveyor belt.

“For the little girl,” I said.

The cashier, a dumpy little blond woman with a cute face who’d been looking at Maeve, and then at me, broke into a big smile that was more awkward than fake.

“Well,” she said to Maeve, “I wish my daddy was as sweet as yours.”

Maeve stopped chewing the Snickers and stared at me as if she’d never seen me before in her life.

Understand, we are in a wooded ravine, a green, jungly gash in the earth, surrounded by natural walls. This land between the old mines and town, it’s wooded canyons cut by creeks that wind around and feed a chain of quiet little lakes on down to ours, where the water deepens, darkens, and pours over the spillway onto the slated shoals. From there it rounds a bend down toward the swamps, seeps back into the underground river. The cicadas spool up so loud you think there’s a torn seam in the air through which their shrieking slipped from another world.

One evening I was out on the porch in the late light after supper and saw Maeve sneak off into the woods. The coon dog got up and followed her, and then a couple of other strays followed him. When she didn’t come right back I stood up and listened. The light was leaking fast into dusk. Crickets and tree frogs sang their high-pitched songs. Then from the woods in the direction she’d headed came a sudden jumble of high vicious mauling. It froze me to hear it. Then it all died down.

I went inside for the shotgun and the flashlight but when I came back out Maeve had made her way back through the thicket and into the ghostly yard, all color gone to shadowy gray, the nightslip wadded into a diaper she held to herself with both hands. I suppose it wasn’t this child’s first. She walked through the yard. What dogs hadn’t gone with her stood around with heads held low, she something terrible and holy, lumpy stomach smeared with blood. She went to the lake’s edge to wash herself and the slip, soaking and wringing it till she fell out and I had to go save her and take her into the house and bathe her myself and put her to bed. Her swollen little-girl’s bosoms were smooth and white as the moon, the leaky nipples big as berries. I fed her some antibiotics left over from when I’d had the flu, and in a short time she recovered. She was young. Her old coonhound never came back, nor the others that went out with him, and I had a vision of them all devouring one another like snakes, until they disappeared.

I couldn’t sleep and went out into the yard, slipped out of my jeans and into the lake. I thought a swim might calm me. I was floating on my back in the shallows looking up at the moon so big and clear you could imagine how the dust would feel between your fingers. My blood was up. I thought I heard something through the water, and stood. It was coming from across the lake, in the thick bramble up on the steep ridge, where a strange woman had moved into an empty cabin some months back. I heard a man one night up there, howling and saying her name, I couldn’t tell what it was.

I’d seen her in town. She carried herself like a man, with strong wiry arms, a sun-scored neck, and a face hard and strange as the wood knots the carvers call tree spirits. I heard she’s an installer for the phone company.

When I stood up in the water I could hear a steady rattling of branches and a skidding racket, something coming down the steep ridge wall. I waded back toward the bank, stopped and looked, and she crashed out of the bushes overhanging the water, dangling naked from a moonlit branch. She dropped into the lake with a quiet little splash, and when she entered the water it was like she’d taken hold of me. I didn’t do that to myself anymore, though maybe I should’ve because I was sometimes all over Maeve in my sleep until she began to shout and scratch, for she was too afraid to sleep alone but must not be touched even by accident. But now here I was spilling myself into the shallows where the water tickled my ankles.

I saw her arms rise from the water and wheel slowly over her round, wet head and dip again beneath. She made no noise. She swam around the curve up into the shallows, stood up, and walked toward me and never took her eyes off my own.

She took my hand, and looked into the palm. She had a lean rangy skinned-cat body, and a deep little muttering voice.

“Small slim hands,” she said, “a sad and lonely man. You see the big picture, but you have no real life.” She grumbled a minute. “Short thin fingers, tapered ends. A stiff and waisted thumb, hmmm. Better off alone, I suppose.” She pressed into the flesh below my thumb. “Ummhmm,” she said, tracing all the little cracks and stars and broken lines in the middle of the palm with a light fingernail. She looked at it close for a second, then dropped it. She turned and sighed and looked back across the lake. I turned my eyes from her saggy little fanny and skinny legs.

“My name’s Callie. I’m your neighbor,” she said.

“I know it,” I said.

She said, “Who’s that little girl you taking care of?”

“My niece,” I said. She was my younger cousin, but I had told her to call me uncle because it sounded more natural. I said, “She’s had a hard life.”

“Mmm,” she said, and we were quiet for a while. “Well, the world ain’t no place for an innocent soul, now is it?”

“It is not,” I agreed.

“Must be hard on a man,” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean being alone out here with a pretty little girl.”

“She’s my niece, I’m not that way.”

She turned and looked at me and then at the house for a minute.

“Why don’t you come on up to the ridge sometime and pay me a visit?” Her thin lips crooked up and parted in a grin. She raised a hand and walked back into the water and swam around the curve into the cove and out of sight. I sat down on the bank. There was a sound and I turned my head to see Maeve up from bed and standing unsteady on the porch, fiddling with the little blue headphones radio, which she didn’t at the moment seem to understand how to use. Then in a minute she had them on again, and just stood there.

Now that she wasn’t carrying, she roamed the canyon with the strays. She ate raw peanuts from a sack I had on the kitchen counter, and drank her water from the lake down on her hands and muddy knees. She smelled like a dog that’s been wallowing in the lake mud, that sour dank stink of rotten roots and scum. I finally held her in the bathtub one day, took the headphones off her head, and plunged her in, her scratching and screaming. I scrubbed her down and lathered up her head and dunked her till she was squeaky, and plucked a fat tick out of her scalp. But when I tried to dress her in some of Greta’s old clothes, shut up in plastic and mothballs all these years, she slashed my cheek with her raggedy nails and ran through the house naked and making a high, thin, and breathless sound until she sniffed out the old rag she wore and flew out through the yard and into the woods buck naked with that rag in her hand and didn’t come back till that evening, wearing it, smelling of the lake water again, and curled up asleep on the bare porchboards.

When I went to the screen door she didn’t look up but said from where she lay hugging herself, “Don’t you handle me that way no more.”

“I had to clean you, child.”

“I can’t be touched,” she said.

“All right.”

“That woman at the big store said you was my daddy.”

“But you know I’m not, I’m your uncle.”

“I don’t want no daddy,” she said. “I just come out of the woods that day I come here, and I didn’t come from nowhere before that.”

“All right,” I said, though my heart sank when she said it, for I wanted her to care about me in some way, but I don’t think that was something she knew how to do. I fixed her a makeshift bed on the sofa in the den where I finally convinced her to sleep. As long as I kept my distance and made no sudden moves toward her and did not ever raise my voice above the gentle words you would use with a baby, we were all right. But it was not a way any man could live for long and I wondered what I could do — send her back to Sebastian’s place, where she was but chattel? I feared one day she would wander into the woods and go wild. I might have called the county, said, Look, this child, who has wandered here from my uncle’s house, is in need of attention and there is nothing more I can do.

Who would take in such a child but the mental hospital up in Tuscaloosa?

I figured Sebastian thought she’d been sucked up into the twister and scattered into blood and dust, until the afternoon I heard his pickup muttering and coughing along the dam and then his springs sighing as he idled down the steep drive to the house, and then the creaking door and I was out on the porch waiting on him. He stopped at the steps and nodded and looked off across the lake as if we were lost together in thought. Uncle Sebastian was old and small and thin and hard as iron and he had the impish and shrewd face of all his siblings. His face was narrow and his eves slanted down and in and his chin jutted up so that if you viewed him in profile his head was the blade of a scythe and his body the handle. He blinked in the sun and said, “We been most of the summer fixing up the house after that tornado back in the spring.”

I said, “Anybody hurt?”

“Well, we thought we’d lost little Maeve.” And he turns to me. “Then I hear tell she’s showed up over here, staying with you.”

“Where would you hear that?” I said, and he said nothing but I saw his eyes shift just a fraction up toward the ridge where the crazy woman’s house is perched.

The strays had shown little interest in Sebastian’s arrival and kept mainly to their little scooped-out cool spots under the bushes, a flea-drowsing shade. Hardly moved all August; through the long hot days all you’d hear was the occasional creaking yawn, wet gnashing of grooming teeth, isolated flappity racket of a wet dog shaking out his coat. Hardly any barking at all. We heard a rustling and Maeve stood at the edge of the yard in her headphones, a scruffy little longhaired stray at her heels.

“She was with child,” Sebastian said.

“She lost it.”

“That late?” he said and looked at me a long moment, then back at Maeve. “You keeping her outdoors and living with dogs?”

“If it was true, it would not be so different from what she came from,” I said.

“Go to hell,” Sebastian said. “Living out here by yourself, you going to tell me you ain’t been trying some of that?”

“That’s right.”

“Them boys of mine done all wandered off now she’s gone. I ain’t got no help.”

He walked slowly toward Maeve, who was standing there with two fingers of one hand pressed to the speaker over her right ear, head cocked, eyes cut left looking out at the lake. The little stray slinked back into the brush. Only when Sebastian laid his hand on Maeve’s arm did she lean away, her bare feet planted the way an animal that does not want to be moved will do. He began to drag her and she struggled, making not a sound, still just listening.

I walked up behind Sebastian and said his name, and when he turned I hit him between the eyes with the point of my knuckle. Small and old as he was, he crumpled. Maeve did not run then but walked over to the porch, up the steps, and into the house.

I dragged the old man by his armpits to the water, and waded out with him trailing. Maeve came out again and followed in her nightslip to the bank, and stood there eating a cherry popsicle. She took the popsicle out of her mouth and held it like a little beacon beside her head. Her lips were red and swollen-looking. She took the blue headphones off her ears and let them rest around her neck. I could hear the tinny sound of something in there, now it wasn’t inside of her head.

“What you doing with that man?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you drownden him?”

I said the first thing that came to mind.

“I am baptizing,” I said. “I am cleansing his heart.”

It was late afternoon then. I looked back over my shoulder at Maeve. She was half lit by sunlight sifting through the leaves, half in shadow. A mostly naked child in rotten garment.

Underwater, Uncle Sebastian jerked and his eyes came open. I held him harder and waded out to where it was up to my shoulders and the current strong toward the spillway, my heart heavy in the water, the pressure there pressing on it. Behind me. Maeve waded into the shallows.

“I want it too, Uncle,” she called.

Sebastian’s arms ceased thrashing, and after a minute I let him go. I saw him turning away in the water. Palms of his hands, a glimpse of an eye, the ragged toe of a boot dimpling the surface, all in a slow drifting toward the spillway, and then gone in the murk. Maeve lifted the gauzy nightslip up over her head as she waded in, her pale middle soft and mapped with squiggly brown stretch marks. I pushed against the current trying to reach her before she got in too deep. There was such unspeakable love in me. I was as vile as my uncle, as vile as he claimed.

“Hold still, wait there,” I said at the very moment her head went under as if she’d been yanked from below.

The bottom is slippery, there are uncounted little sinkholes. Out of her surprised little hand, the nightslip floated a ways and sank. I dove down but the water slowed me and I could not reach her. My eyes were open but the water was so muddy I could barely even see my own hands. I kept gasping up and diving down, the sun was sinking into the trees.

She would not show again until dusk, when from the bank I saw her ghost rise from the water and walk into the woods.

The strays tuned up. There was a ringing from the telephone inside the house. It would ring and stop a while. Ring and then stop. The sheriff’s car rolled its silent flickering way through the trees. Its lights put a flame in all the whispering leaves. There was a hollow taunting shout from up on the ridge but I paid it no mind.

I once heard at dawn the strangest bird, unnatural, like sweet notes sung through an outdoor PA system, some bullhorn perched in a tree in the woods, and I went outside.

It was coming from cast of the house, where the tornado would come through. I walked down a trail, looking up. It got louder. I got to where it had to be, it was all around me in the air, but there was nothing in the trees. A pocket of air had picked up a signal, the way a tooth filling will pick up a radio station.

It rang in my blood, it and me the only living things in that patch of woods, all the creatures fled or dug in deep, and I remember that I felt a strange happiness.