Bark: Stories (12 page)

“Casey!” the old man shouted the next morning. He was out in his front yard pounding together something that looked like a bird feeder on a post.

“Hi!” she said.

“You know my name?”

“Pardon me?”

“Old family joke.” He still seemed to be shouting. “Actually my name is Milton Theale.”

“Milton.” She repeated the name, a habit people with good memories supposedly relied on. “They don’t name kids Milton anymore.”

“Too bad and thank God! My father’s name was Hi, short for Hiram, and now that I’m old I find my head filled up with
his
jokes and stories rather than very many of my own, which apparently I’ve forgotten.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, as long as you don’t actually come to believe you are your dad, I suppose all is well.”

“Well, that may be next.”

“Probably that’s always next. For all of us.”

He squinted to study her, seemed to be admiring something about her again, but she was not sure what. No doubt something that was a complete mirage.

“Nice to see you again,” he said. “And you, too,” he said to the dog. “Though you are a strange-looking thing. It’s like he’s been assembled by Nazi veterinarians—a shepherd’s head, a dachshund’s body, a—”

“Yeah, I know. Sometimes he reminds me of the dog in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.”

“Hmmm?”

“The remake.”

“The remake of what?”

“Frankenstein!” she yelled. His deafness would give her a heart attack. Perhaps this was nature’s plan for old people to kill each other in an efficient if irritating fashion.

She could feel the heat leaving the coffee and entering her hand. “He’s like a dog made in Frankenstein’s lab!” Sometimes she hated the dog. His obliviousness to the needs of others, his determined, verbally challenged conversation about his own desires—in a human this would indicate a severe personality disorder.

“Oh, he’s not that bad,” said Milt. “And wouldn’t we like his energy. In tablet form.”

“That would be fantastic.”

“But you’re young; you wouldn’t need something like that.”

“I need something.” Was she whining? She had never made such an announcement to a stranger before.

“In lieu of that, come on in and have a blueberry muffin with me.” Again, the line between neighborliness and flirtation was not clear to her here. She knew in this community you had to do an extroverted kind of meet and greet, but she had heard of soccer parents wandering off from their children’s games and having sex in far parking lots. So the guidelines were murky and breachable. “And while you’re at it you can help me with the crossword puzzle.”

“Oh, I can’t. I have to get home. Lot of things to tend to.”

“Well, it’s not ten to. It’s ten past.”

“To
tend
to,” KC repeated. Perhaps his deafness had exhausted all the other neighbors and this accounted for his friendliness to her. On the other hand, no one seemed to
walk around here. Either they jogged, their ears stuffed with music, or they drove their cars at murderous speeds. One old man could not have single-handedly caused that. Or could he have?

“Hmmm?”

“Gotta get home.”

“Oh, OK,” he said and waved her on.

“Maybe tomorrow,” she said out of kindness.

He nodded and went back to work.

She stopped and turned. “Are you making a bird feeder?”

“No, it’s a book nook! I’ll put books inside and people can help themselves. Like a little library. Now that the bookstore is closed. I’m just adjusting the clasp.”

“How lovely.” It was a varnished pine angled to look like the ski chalet of a doll.

“Giving the old guy a thrill? Good idea.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m just saying,” said Dench in a hushed tone. “He’s probably loaded. And gonna keel soon. And …”

“Stop.” This was the grifter in Dench, something violent in the name of freedom, like his father, who had fled through the men’s room window. “Don’t say another word.”

“Hey—I’m not talking about murdering him! I’m just saying you could spend a little time, make him happy, and then the end result might be, well … we’d all be a little happier. Where’s the harm?”

“You’ve really gone over to the dark side.” He could be shameless. Perhaps shamelessness kept bitterness at bay. Not a
chance Dench could ever be bitter. Never even post-bitter. Bitterness came when one had done the long good thing and then gone unrewarded. Dench would never operate that way. She, on the other hand, had been born with a sort of pre-bitterness, casting about for the good and unacknowledged deed that would explain her feelings—and not coming up with it. So instead a sourness could beset her, which she had to appease and shrink with ice cream and biographies of Billie Holiday.

“Hey, wasn’t it you who wrote, ‘Get your hands on some real meat’?” Now he began to sing. “ ‘An old shoe can be made chewy like game / but it takes a raftload of herbs and it’s just not the same.’ You wrote that.”

“That was a love song to a chef. Before I knew you.”

“It’s good. It’s got existentialism
and
advice.” His eyes avoided hers.

“You’re pimping me. Is this what you call your ‘talent for life’?” He had once boasted he possessed such a thing.

“It’s a working view.”

“You’d better be careful, Dench. I take your suggestions seriously.”

He paused and looked at her, sternness in one eye and gentleness in the other. “Well, my first piece of advice is don’t take my advice. And there’s more where that came from.”

“There’s a smell in the house. Yeasty and sulfuric. Can you smell it?” She looked at Dench with concern, but he seemed to have none.

“The zeitgeist!”

“Something rotting in the walls.”

“Meat or shoe?”

“Something that died in the winter and now that it’s spring
is decaying in the floorboards or some crawl space or one of the walls of this room.”

“Maybe my allergies are acting up. But I think I have smelled it along this side of the house, on warmer days, out there trying to get better cell phone reception. A cabbagey cheese smell: goaty with a kind of ammonia rot.”

She reached for a sip of Dench’s coffee.

“He probably has adult children who will inherit everything.”

“Probably,” said Dench, turning away and then looking back at her to study her face.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

Dench’s sexiness, his frugal, spirited cooking (though he was no Jim Barber), his brooding gaze, his self-deprecating humor, all had lured her in. But it was like walking into a beautiful house to find the rooms all empty. In those beginning years she often saw him locking eyes with others, as if in some pact. He still had no money. She paid. At times he glanced at her with bewildering scorn. There was, in short, little romantic love. No conversation of tender feelings. Just attachment. Just the power of his voice when it spoke of things that had nothing to do with them, when it churned round and round on its loop about his childhood dogs, misdeeds, and rages at his lot. He was attractive. He was amusing. But he was not emotionally well. Intimacy was not his strong suit. “Clubs and spades,” he joked. “Not diamonds, not hearts. Red cards—I just see red. They throw me out of the game every time.”

“Shut up and drink your beer.”

Where were the drugs?

She could see he felt sometimes that he could prey upon her insecurities and still be taken in and cared for by her. Was not the news always full of one beautiful young movie star after another thrown over for some younger and more beautiful movie star? What hope was there for ordinary women? He required a patroness but had mistakenly auditioned for her. If she possessed fewer psychic wounds than he had hoped for in a woman her age, or at least different ones, he would attempt to create some. But she was less woundable than he might think. She had not had a father who had to see a man about a horse. She in fact had a father who’d been killed by a car named after a horse. Along with her mother. A Mustang! How weird was that? Well, she had been a baby and hadn’t had to deal with it.

Her grandmother had almost never mentioned her mother. Or her father. They had been scurrying across a street to get home, holding hands, which had fatally slowed them down.

Where were the drugs?

Patience was a chemical. Derived from a mineral. Derived from a star. She felt she had a bit of it. But it was not always fruitful, or fruitful with the right fruit. Once she had found a letter in Dench’s coat—it was a draft in his writing with his recognizable cross-outs and it began,
It has always been hard for me to say, but your love has meant the world to me
. She did not read to the end but stuffed it back inside the coat pocket, not wanting to ruin things for him or the moving surprise of it for herself. She would let him finish his composing and choose the delivery time. But the letter never arrived or showed up for her in any manner whatsoever. She waited for months. When she finally asked about it, in a general way, he looked
at her with derision and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Inside the old man’s house wide doorways led to shaded rooms, corridors to stairways to more corridors. Whole areas of the house were closed off with ivory quilts hung with clipped rings from fishing spears—to save on heating, she quickly surmised. There were stacks of reading material—a not uncozy clutter of magazines, some opened and abandoned, and piles of books, both new and used. On top of one was a dried-out spider plant that looked—as they used to say with blithe heartlessness of all their dying spider plants—like Bob Marley on chemo. She recognized the panic at even a moment’s boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time. In a far room she spied a piano, an old Mason & Hamlin grand, its ebony surface matte with dust, and wondered if it was tuned. Its lid was down and stacks of newspaper sat on top.

“Don’t mind the clutter, just follow me through it—the muffins are in the kitchen,” he said. She followed his swaying gait into the back of the house. Beneath the wisps of white hair his skull was shiny and his scalp had the large brown spots of a giraffe—if only they weren’t signs of looming death they would look appealing and whimsical and young people would probably want them—give me a liver spot!—as tattoos. Smaller versions freckled his hands. “I keep hoping this clutter is charming and not a sign of senility. I find myself not able to tell.”

“It’s like a bookstore or a thrift shop. That kind of clutter is always charming.”

“Really?”

“Perhaps you could go all the way and put little price tags on everything.” A shaming heat flushed her face.

“Ha! Well, that was partly the idea with the book nook out front. That I could put some of this to use. But feel free to add your own. All contributions welcome.” The muffins were store-bought ones he had reheated in a microwave. He had not really made them at all. “I shop sparingly. You never know how long you’ve got. I don’t even buy green bananas. That’s investing with reckless hope in the future.”

“Very funny.”

“Is it?” He was searching her face.

“Well, I mean … yes, it is.”

“Would you like some coffee, or do you want to just stick with your own?” He signaled with his head toward the paper cup she still held, with its white plastic top and its warted brown vest made of recycled paper bags. She looked on the counter and saw that it was instant coffee he meant, a jar of Nescafé near the stove. He turned the burner on, and gas flamed into the blue spikes of a bachelor’s button beneath the kettle.

“Oh, this is fine,” KC said. What did she care if Dench got no coffee today? He would prefer this mission of neighborly friendliness.

She sat down at Milt’s table and he placed the muffin on a plate in front of her. Then he sat down himself. “So tell me about yourself,” he said, then grinned wanly. “What brings you to this neighborhood?”

“Do I stand out that much?”

“I’m afraid you do. And not just because of those tattoos.”

She only had three. She would explain them all to him later, which was what they were for: each was a story. There was
“Decatur” along her neck, the vow never to return there. There was also a “Moline” one along her collarbone—a vow never to return there. The “Swanee” along her left biceps was because she liked the chord ascension in that song, a cry of homesickness the band had deconstructed and electrified into a sneer. It was sometimes their encore. When there was one. It was also a vow never to return there. She mostly forgot about all these places until she looked into a mirror after a bath.

“My music career didn’t work out and I’m subletting here. I came back to this town because this is where I used to visit my grandmother in a nursing home when I was young. I liked the lake. And she was in a place that looked out onto it and when I went to see her I would go into a large room with large windows and she would race over in her wheelchair. She was the fastest one there with the chairs.”

He smiled at her. “I know exactly the place you mean. It’s got a hospice wing in it called Memory Station. Though no one in it can recall a thing.”

KC stuffed the muffin in her mouth and flattened its moist crenellated paper into a semicircle.

“What kind of music do you play? Is it loud and angry?” he asked with a grin.

“Sometimes,” she said, chewing. “But sometimes it was gentle and musing.” Past tense. Her band was dead and it hadn’t even taken a plane crash to do it because they hadn’t been able to afford to fly except once. “I’ll come by and play something for you sometime.”

His face brightened. “I’ll get the piano tuned,” he said.

There was that smell again, thawing with the final remnants of winter, in their walls. This was the sort of neighborhood where one would scarcely smell a rancid onion in a trash can. But now this strange meaty rot, with its overtones of Roquefort.

“What do you really think that is?’ ” KC asked Dench through the bathroom door. The change of seasons had brought new viruses and he was waterboarding himself with a neti pot.

“What?”

“The smell,” she said.

“I can’t smell anything right now—my nose is too congested.”