Stepdog (21 page)

“I was never going to
help
you get the dog back,” said Alex, as if this should somehow be comforting. “I was going to decide if you deserved a shot at helping
yourself
to get the dog back.”

“And you're saying I don't,” I said, still staccato because I was so close to losing the plot. “You're saying: fuck you, Rory, and to hell with Cousin Sara. Jay keeps the dog, end of story, because I like how he behaves when we get drunk together.”

He gave me a surprised look. Remarkably, that might have been the first time I'd cursed in front of him. It helped!

“Well, I'm not passing
definitive
judgment yet,” he said. “But I have my doubts.”

I took a deep breath and released it as slowly as I could—which wasn't slowly at all—trying to calm myself. “I
have to
get the dog back,” I said, trying to sound calm.

“Or else you lose your green card,” Alex said, with a sympathetic nod. “I figure that's what this is really about, you have to get her dog back or you lose your work permit.”

“It's not that simple!” I snapped, and then pursed my lips hard to keep them from trembling.

Alex shrugged comfortably. “Seems pretty simple to me. Sara would help out anyone, she's a bleeding-heart liberal to beat the band, but the one thing that would piss her off is losing her dog. It's real clear: you get her dog back to her or she goes to the feds and rescinds the green card and your ass gets deported. I get it. How well do you two even know each other, really?”

I stared at him, so enraged I didn't trust myself to speak without murdering him. “We're
married,
” I said.

“For a green card,” he reminded me, as if it were a private joke between us.

“We're
in love,
” I said, feeling the tendons in my neck standing out about a foot.

He shrugged. “If you say so, brother. I can't vouch for that 'cuz you're giving me
nothing
here. I've given you about seventeen chances to show me you have some passion or personality, and from what I can tell, you don't!” He laughed in a no-harm-done sort of way. “You're probably a lovely guy back home, but I don't know you from shinola.”

I could feel tears of rage and despair clinging to the roots of my eyelids. I was shaking—could actually see my own body shaking, as if I were something separate and apart from it. Impulsively, I grabbed the moonshine and took another mouthful. I wanted to fall into that fucking jar. “This is like lemonade compared to the
poitín
my uncles used to make back home,” I said, which was childish, I admit, but felt good anyhow. I wanted to pay him back for all the insults.

“Good to know,” said Alex. “I'd love to go to Ireland sometime
and maybe I can look 'em up and drink with them. Or with you, since you're likely to find yourself back there. Perfectly happy to get to actually know you, sometime when you're up for showing me what you're made of.”

“You've got me wrong,” I said, and rubbed my hands over my face. How lovely it would be if I could just pull the skin off and then reattach it to be somebody else.

“Whatever you say,” he said sympathetically.

I looked morosely around the room. I was half locked already and there was no reason not to just fall all the way—at least I could escape myself for a couple hours. Nothing to lose now. I'd failed to demonstrate character. How
fucking ironic
for an actor—failing to show
character
! The room was starting to spin a little, pleasantly, and the buzz of the refrigerator and overhead lights was muffled by a more internal buzz. In the corner, by the hallway leading to the back rooms, were two objects I somehow didn't notice before: a banjo, leaning against the wall. Beside it, a fiddle case, lying open, with a fiddle right inside it. The only thing that felt familiar in the universe right now.

“You play?” I asked.

“Banjo? Since high school,” he said. “Part of why I wanted to move to North Carolina. Tommy Jarrell country, man.”

“Can I . . .” I was too depressed to even feel I had the right to ask. “I play a little, do you mind—”

He gave me a skeptical look. I realized I had slurred that request into almost a single syllable. I was drunker than I realized—damn, that happened fast. I could tell what he was thinking:
Not only a cad, but can't even hold his liquor.

Alex picked up each dog in turn, and with a kiss on each nose
and a brief lisping apology, set them down beside his chair so he could raise his bulk to standing. He crossed to the banjo and grabbed it round its slender neck. The dogs, apparently used to a certain nocturnal banjo-and-moonshine routine, looked at each other in disappointment and then waddled side by side over to a little dog bed beside the door, climbed in, and lay down, pressing up against each other. In unison, they sighed.

Alex sat and reached for a peg to tune the banjo, gently plucking the first string, which made a plunky sound. “I'm in G,” he said. “Or I will be in a moment. I play old time, not bluegrass so much. What's your pleasure?”

“Actually I meant the fiddle,” I said, trying to make it more than one syllable, which made me sound so drunk I almost started laughing at my own patheticness.

“Fiddle's new for me,” he said. “Still getting the hang of it.”

“But. I. Play,” I said, carefully. “The. Fiddle. May. I. Play?”

He looked at me a moment and then burst out into one of his alarmingly loud laughs. “Brother, you are
wasted,
” he said. “You have the tolerance of a
squirrel
.”

I took a breath, paused, and then willed myself to enunciate. “I'd like to play around with the fiddle.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself. Let me get it for you, I don't think you can stand up.” He set the banjo on the table, got the fiddle from its case, and offered it to me, with the bow.

“What are we starting with?” he asked, grinning, watching my jerky, uncoordinated moves, amused at the prospect of what a disaster this would be.

“‘Sailor's Hornpipe'?” (Everyone knows this tune. It's the most-played hornpipe in history. The moment you hear it, little cartoon
sailors start dancing about in your head. Even if you aren't on moonshine.)

I tightened the bow, wishing I were sober, took my time rosining it and tuning to his middle G. A fiddle in my hands, the roughed-amber texture of the rosin and the pressure of the strings, these were all reassuring, but it was an unfamiliar fiddle and I wouldn't have a chance to make friends with it. My only choice here was to go for broke. Oh, boy.

“Let me just try a few scales,” I said uncertainly. Starting at high C, I played a very wobbly scale down to middle C, as on-the-edge-of-wrong as a rank beginner. Alex winced, embarrassed for me as I teetered through it. “I suppose I'm pretty drunk,” I said ruefully. He nodded, cringed. Looked appalled. At C, I hesitated, then played D again, a little sharp, then pushed up to E—

—and then
flew
into “Flight of the Bumblebee” at a nice clip (if you don't know it, that's the classical piece made up of chromatic scales played so fast it sounds, well, like a bumblebee. Obviously!). This was my favorite old busking trick. I'm no virtuoso, and I only knew about twenty measures, but I'd spent my otherwise misspent youth practicing them until I could almost literally play them in my sleep—and being a good Irish musician, I could
definitely
play them drunk. Not with any artistic finesse, Isaac Stern would be spinning in his grave. But it always did the trick. As it did now.

Alex gaped, astounded. I gave him a sweet smile and closed my eyes. After a dozen or so measures—about where Rimsky-Korsakov starts using all those fucking accidentals—Alex absolutely
hollered
with the laughter, which gave me an excuse to stop playing just as I was running out of notes anyhow. The dogs
jumped up and checked in with each other again before looking up at him for directions.

“Sorry?” I said blearily, as if I were too drunk to understand him.

“All righty!” he said, applauding. I took a breath. Maybe this would be okay in the end. “Christ, man, you can do that on
moonshine
? I gotta keep you around a while.”

“Alas.” I shrugged the same cheerfully complacent shrug he'd been subjecting me to all evening. “I'm already booked.”

He looked at me with the sudden possibility of maybe, just maybe, finding me respectable. “So Sara wasn't bullshitting me? You do this stuff for real?”

“Well, they gave me a television show,” I said. My God, that quadrant of my life seemed impossibly distant at the moment.

He strummed his fingers across the banjo strings, looking very pleased. “All right, then. Let's see what happens when Redneck meets Paddy.”

“Mick, if you please,” I said.

“Awesome,” he said. “I'll take it off you.”

So I started in on “Sailor's Hornpipe,” decorating it with trills and grace notes. Alex snorted. “That's sissy playing,” he said. He joined in, immediately driving the tempo so hard that I stopped decorating it. “That's better,” he approved. “See, here in America we play it for folks to
dance
to.”

“Oh, well, now, in Ireland, we play it so it's
good,
” I retorted. Again he hollered with approving laughter.

And that was what it took. Now we were mates.

T
wo hours and several swigs of moonshine later, we were still playing.

“‘Hop High Ladies'!” Alex suggested.

“Don't know it,” I said.

He started to play a familiar melody.

“That's ‘Miss McLeod's Reel,'” I said scornfully, in a tone I'd never have used earlier. “Learn the fucking name, you ignorant cracker.”

He bellowed a dachshund-alarming laugh. “Brother!” he hollered, and faster we played.

He capo'd up to A for a while, for “Old Mother Flanagan,” “Red-Haired Boy,” and “Old Molly Hare” (which I wanted to play in F, but the bastard was too lazy to retune).

When we were bored with G, we moved to D. Started with “Fisher's Hornpipe,” one of my favorites. “Boys of Blue Hill,” “Rickett's Hornpipe,” “St. Anne's Reel”—it was great crack. It was strange and different playing with an old-time banjo, there was a rough-and-ready, primitive quality to the music, but it was thrilling, with the driving beat to make you want to dance with
abandon while you were playing. And, combined with moonshine consumption, it provided an excellent environment in which to breed insults, name-calling, and all kinds of slagging. And Alex was a fantastic musician. Under other circumstances, I'd have played with him until my fingers bled.

But these weren't other circumstances. It was late—so late it was early, and I'd been up twenty-two hours straight—and I was actually here not to have a bromance-jam with Sara's cousin, but to get her dog back as quick as possible. I had to get some decent sleep, which hadn't happened in a couple of days. Alex looked like he could have continued to play without pause for several hours, so I'd have to lull him. You can't lull much with old-time music.

“In honor of southern history,” I said, when we paused for another slosh of moonshine, “how about I play you Thomas Jefferson's favorite tune.”

He gave me a suspicious look. “What the hell would you know about that?” he asked. “You going to tell me it's ‘Irish Spring' or something?” Then he bellowed with laughter.

“I met the celestial Sara Renault when she hired me as a guest lecturer to play at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. I'd go around with the tours and play music that was specific to each era that was represented. Phrygian scales for the Egyptian art, Fauré for this one particular John Singer Sargent. They've got a big Colonial collection, so I played all the tunes popular back then, especially what Jefferson liked because he was a fiddler himself, and as a southerner, clearly had the best taste.”

He grinned. “Don't you suck up to me, brother, I'm actually from Chicago.”

Without retorting, I began to play the Adagio of Corelli's Sonata no. 1 in D Major. Alex, poised for another foot-stomper, looked briefly taken aback, then tipped his head thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, almost grudgingly. “That's beautiful.”

“Sit back and enjoy it,” I crooned. Really I was a crap violinist, so I was hardly doing it justice, but compared to what we'd been getting up to, it was as if a ballerina was dancing the encore for a hip-hop concert. Alex set down his banjo, sat back, closed his eyes, and, sure enough, was snoring before I'd finished the Adagio. The dachshunds waddled out of their bed to stare at him, then me, dumbfounded.

He snorted himself awake a moment later, shook his head, and looked around bleary-eyed. “All right. I believe it's time for bed,” he declared. “I got the guest room made up for you all.”

You all?

Seeing the look on my face, he gave me a sly, sleepy grin. “You haven't forgotten that you're here to show me you're a dog lover, right? Well, nobody knows a dog lover better than a dog. My two buddies are going to hang with you overnight. They'll give me a full report in the morning.”

A
ND SO IT
came to pass that about six hours later, I awoke with a hangover worse than I'd had the day of the green-card interview, if that was possible, and one small dog spooning up against my back . . . and the other lying across the length of my pillow, pressing his back into the top of my skull. So that when I finally managed to drag my scratchy-dry eyes open, I was looking directly at his skinny tail. When I moved slightly, the tail wagged, smacking the pillow in front of my nose.

“Good morning, tail,” I muttered, sounding and feeling very crusty. My tongue was twice its normal size and dry as asbestos.

The door opened. I felt both dachshunds raise their heads and glance over. There was Alex, in the same clothes he'd worn last night, grinning as if he'd never slept, or would ever need to. “Morning, everyone!” he declared. Both dachshunds tensed, preparing to leap toward him on his order.

“I like the look of that,” he said. “They approve of you. That's a thumbs-up. C'mon, puppies! Who wants breakfast?”

When they were gone, I pulled myself out of bed and groggily looked around. Sunlight was slanting viciously through some venetian blinds beside the bed, illuminating a nondescript guest room. My memory of getting in here last night (or rather, earlier this morning) was sketchy at best. I was still wearing my clothes from the day before, and moonshine must have spilled somewhere, because something stank of rotten apples.

My bag sat on the carpet across from the bed. I couldn't actually remember bringing it in here. Dying for a glass of water, head throbbing, I clumsily changed into fresh jeans and shirt, and wondered about a shower. Ran the back of my hand across my face—God, I needed a shave. Or to grow a real beard already.

Blearily, I followed the seductive smell of bacon wafting down the hall, and found Alex in a chef's apron, a blond Emeril Lagasse, frying up not only bacon, but eggs and potatoes as well. It all looked, and smelled, heavenly. Possibly even better than that first breakfast at Sara's place last August—because here, the bacon had promise, looked almost like rashers, big and thick. I was going to comment on it, but I was afraid Alex would tell me he'd butchered the hog himself, and that would make it too per
sonal for me to eat it. So I kept my mouth shut except to say, in a froggy tone, “Good morning.” If my salivary glands were working, I'd've been drooling.

“Morning to you!” he said cheerfully.

“Water?” I said.

“Ha! You look like you'd do better with some more moonshine. Works for me.” He jutted his chin toward something on the counter. “You got a couple of messages.”

I poured myself a glass of water, drank it all down, poured a second, and sipped at it. Who would be calling me at seven in the morning, especially since I'd told Alto I was on the case? I picked up the phone and looked at the voice-mail log. Sara's number. Five calls. All last night, when we'd been drinking and playing tunes. “Oh, fuck me,” I said aloud. I had gotten sucked into the Alex Craggs vortex and hadn't even remembered to tell her I'd arrived.

“I got three myself,” hummed Alex with perfect understanding. “Do yourself a favor and don't listen to them, she really works herself into a lather. Especially at about four
A.M
.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the glass door that led to the backyard. It was wonderfully cool. “Of course I have to listen to them,” I said. “I have to call her back.” I seemed to recall something about time zones, but I couldn't do the math. “Later. When we're both awake.”

“She'll be awake as soon as you call her,” Alex joked. When I didn't laugh along with him, he shrugged agreeably and said, “Suit yourself. Meanwhile, you got a dog to win back.”

That brought some alertness. I could feel my pulse quicken, pressing against my dehydrated temples. “You going to help me?”

“I'm going to be impartial,” he said. “But as an
independent consultant,
I might be in a position to advise you a bit. On the side. Have some breakfast first.”

“Let me just listen to these messages,” I said. Alex rolled his eyes. As he set an impressive table, I tapped in my password and sat, steeling myself for the onslaught.

First: “Hi, it's me, it's about seven your time. You should be there by now, maybe your phone died? I'm going to call Alex and see if you've arrived.”

Second: “Rory, it's about eight your time. Alex isn't answering. Are you all right? Are you there? Is Cody there? What's going on? Call me please.”

Third: “Rory, it's me, it's eleven o'clock, I can't believe you haven't called me. Are you dead? Is Cody with you? What's going on? Call me!”

Fourth: “IT'S ONE IN THE MORNING, ARE YOU ASSHOLES DRUNK? HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE CALLED ME? I'M WORRIED SICK AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON! WOULD YOU PLEASE CALL ME WHEN YOU GET THIS?”

I had never heard Sara speak in all-caps before. I felt horrible. And now it was four
A.M.
where she was, so I couldn't call her. My fuckup-ability seemed to be increasing daily.

And . . . there was one more message.

In this final one, her voice was cracking but her tone was horribly calm. “Rory,” she began. “I just called Jonathan, because he was the only one who would answer his phone. His theory is that you are probably drunk out of your mind right now, which further confirms for him what an unfit dog owner you would make. He
tells me you two are duking it out for Cody in a few hours. Whatever that means. Please call. Immediately.”

The shrieking had been easier to take.

“Well now,” said Alex heartily. “Let's eat.”

I put the phone on the table and bent my head over it. Fingertips pressed into eyeballs, I said, “This may be the worst I've felt since puberty.”

“We'll call her back and tell her everything's going to be fine,” said Alex jovially.

I slid one hand away from my face and stared up at him bleakly. “Is it?”

“Hell, yeah!” said Alex. He put down the plate of bacon and picked up my phone. “She's on speed dial, right?”

“It's four in the morning there,” I said, reaching up to take the phone. He casually turned back toward the kitchen counter, moving it out of reach. He examined it a moment, figured it out, and called Sara. “Alex, mate,” I protested, “she's—”

The other end picked up and there was instant frenzy and upset on the other end. Alex let it continue for about ten seconds before interrupting with, “Sara, ma'am, it's Alex here, not Rory, Rory is far too considerate to call you at four
A.M.
, but I figured you're still on East Coast time and you seemed to want to hear from one of us. How's L.A.?”

More upset on the other end.

“Now calm down, Sara, he's fine, the dog is fine, everything's going to be fine.”

She obviously didn't believe him, but in fairness, if our roles were reversed, I'd probably believe him even less.

“No, ma'am,” he said, glancing briefly at me and giving me a
thumbs-up sign, “I don't think your talking to Rory is the best idea right now, because if you go on like this, you're going to make his balls shrivel right up inside his body and that won't be good for anyone. I just wanted to check in with you because you clearly wanted that, but now you should just go back to sleep and one of us will call you with news as soon as this is sorted out. I absolutely promise you, it's going to be fine.”

Pause. Her voice again. I couldn't tell if she believed him now or not. I laid my fevered forehead on the table.

“I'm letting Cody decide,” he said into the phone. “I got it all figured out. Hey, why didn't you tell me this guy plays the fiddle? He's not half bad. Go back to sleep.” He hung up.

“I need a shower,” I said into the table.

“No, you don't,” said Alex. “That's the last thing you need. Don't you know anything about dogs? She's going to go with whoever's smellier.”

I sat up again. “Then I should slather myself in bacon grease,” I said.

He gestured to the plate. “Why do you think I made so much?”

I blinked. “Seriously? That's how I win? With bacon grease?”

Alex laughed. “You don't
win
that way. Jonathan's going to think of doing the same thing. You cancel each other out with the bacon grease. Which means it comes down to something else.”

I could not think what. I could not have named the primary colors the way I was feeling.

“There's two things that rule a dog's life,” Alex said. I really wanted to hear what he had to say but I couldn't sit through an Alex monologue just now. He sat across from me and pushed a
plate of scrambled eggs and potatoes my way. “Eat,” he said. “You'll feel better.”

“Two things,” I echoed him. I reached for my fork. “Tell me, please.”

“Smell, as we've established. Bacon grease aside, your smell means more to Cody than his smell does, and brother”—he laughed—“you've got a lot of smell this morning.” Serious again. “The second thing is the pack. She will go with the leader of the pack.”

“Jay's got that one tied up, he has that calm alpha-male energy. And I don't. I have will-o'-the-wisp energy. And I can't change that. So I'm fucked.”

“I wasn't talking alpha male,” said Alex. “These potatoes came out
great
. No, my friend, when I say pack, I mean
pack
. Who is Cody's pack? You and Sara.”

“That might work if Sara were here,” I said. “On my own, I hardly rate as Cody's
pack
.”

“Sara is the leader of Cody's pack.”

“Sara's not
here,
” I repeated, frustrated.

“Cody doesn't know that,” Alex said, and winked at me.