Authors: Sam Michel
So this is what we did. We did it smoothly. Too smoothly. Despite his protestations
to the contrary, a father likes to see his son put up a fight from time to time, to
keep the father honest, yes, and also to assure a father that the son will one day
do his fighting for himself, as I have come to fight for myself, whenever fighting
cannot be avoided through a peaceable retreat. My son, my son, where had he gone to?
He worked, he continued to support his
end, he was careful not to spill a drop of Hope as we unrolled her from the burlap
to the Visqueen; yet when he stood still, he seemed scarcely more alive to me than
did the dog. The last I saw of color in his cheek subsided shortly after I convinced
him that my notion was to take the dog to Hans, the butcher, not to render her in
cutlets, but to keep her there in Hans’s freezer, as a means of seeing to her preservation.
Well, I kept love in mind, God, my God, I tried to keep things lively. I was on the
up-and-up about the burlap, confessed my squeamishness, my mean desire to keep the
trunk clean. I explained permeability, condensation, rot. I believe that I became
a little bit intoxicated, offering myself in speech, and for this, I had my son to
thank. His silence. A person seldom hears such silences, in the company of other persons.
Quiet, yes, but oftener than not, on the cusp of silence, a word or two intrudes itself
as if from deep inside the brain, or underneath the bones, madness in the retina,
a melancholic jaw, an entire sentence, a question from the honest, acheful heart—
You never really loved me, did you
? Whereas the boy had seemed to still his heart, neither brain nor bone of him intruded
any voluble intelligence that I could cipher. I felt invited, unable to refuse him.
I think I really chattered, yammered, to myself, and to the boy, mindlessly, if this
is possible, heedlessly, at least, how else explain my making mention of the vet?
Of course, it wasn’t so outlandish. Looking back, it seems to me a veterinarian was
well within the category of our crisis. But at the time I only understood that I had
crossed a line, volunteered myself beyond the several errands I recalled my wife put
forth, in providing for the safety of my chair. The dog was dead. Why tease the boy
with healers? Naturally, the boy was cheered. His color was restored. In his cheek,
that is—the purple in his tongue, the
blueness of his lips not having ever left him. I might have said this. I have said
so much. Little I intended. I told myself:
You’ve been standing at this hole for quite awhile now, Mr. Dahl. I wonder, why should
you loiter so caressingly among your plainest failures?
An old question with me, one of the kind that make me feel as toothless and as near
to torpid stupefaction as my son. I can’t say why I still enjoy them. I puzzled myself
a time there, gathered Hope into my arms and led us to the vet.
I thought I saw the day improving, though I think it was the drive misled me. I determined
our velocity, the temperature, our tilt. My toes warmed. My jaw was thawing. By and
by, I recovered the ability to whistle. I put my arm up on the seatback, regarded
the boy, aimed the vent on my side his way. I
cruised.
The scenes we passed appeared to cruise along beside us. I recall a gang of children
playing kick-the-can. A woman pruned a thicket. A woman swung a maul. We passed a
scarecrow dressed as Santa Claus, a beige dog on a chain. We traversed the strip of
neon lights and Christmas-colored bulbs, the clots of burdened shoppers, steered ourselves
through town and on into the desert. How near the desert was! How quickly it arrived!
How long since I had seemed to see its flats and hills, the fallow fields and sheds
and tractors carved and gray and resting here and there throughout the silver tips
of frosted sage, the bitterbrush and deerbrush and the button! How easily I was returned
among those treeless banks whose ways I used to walk to hunt for lizards and for scorpions
and snakes, for arrowheads and crockery and blue-green bottles, my eyes tricked out
for difference, right up where the hills pitched into mountains, the old forbidden
twisted steeps. I felt so young, so good, I think I must have temporarily forgotten
Hope. I nearly asked the boy if
he would like to toodle, drive around, make a little tour of Papa’s boyhood haunts.
I thought then of the vet, as I had known him from my boyhood, around the time my
voice changed, and my steer died, slowly, and painfully, according to this vet’s extended,
unfruitful diagnosis. I asked myself: All these years, how many other steers have
died while in his custody? How many deaths has he left unexplained? I asked myself:
How old must he be? Was he sick, I asked myself, or dead himself, and would he have
a goiter? Instinctively, unfortunately, I turned the rearview mirror on myself and
started fingering my hairline. I pulled the slack out from my neckskin, pressed and
pulled the skin that hung and gathered up in creases underneath and at the corners
of my eyes. I checked my teeth for bits of lettuce leaf and brussels sprouts, green
accumulants between the tooth and the receding gum. Had I aged well? Gained? Lost?
I wondered whether I was the man of the boy the vet had found so tall and straight,
“self-possessed,” I think he said, “level-headed” through what must have seemed to
me a senseless loss. I tried anticipating compliments, considered some polite responses,
decided I would give the credit to my father. My father’s time, his generation, which
meant the vet’s time, too, of course, the credit due to him I merely saw myself repaying.
Such thinking should have pleased the vet, I must have thought, though soon enough
I saw the man was deeply unperturbed, as bland as suddenly I could recall him being
when my steer died.
He said “well” a lot.
I said, “Long time no see.”
He said, “Well.”
“You’re looking good,” I said.
He said, “Well.”
I said, “This is my son.”
And he said, “Well, well, well, I see.”
When I brought in Hope, placed her on the metal table, stiff, exploded, he saw well
enough that she was dead.
“In my line,” says the vet, “at my age, seems like every man that ever owned a milk
cow or an ass in Humbolt County’s got a son I see grow up from tricycles to pickups.
Some sons get themselves another ass, some get dogs and kitties. The lot of them get
sick. So far as I know, all Creation hasn’t got an animal that won’t come down with
something sick enough to kill it.”
And what, he asked me, would I have him do for it? After he confirmed this dog here
was a roadkill, what? After he confirmed she’d been a Schnauzer, what? Was she ours?
he wondered. Because the only Schnauzer that he knew in town turned out to be our
neighbor’s, a yellow-ribboned bitch, he said, named Hope.
“She might be carrying a litter,” said the vet. “I have heard the fellow own’s her,
he was trying pretty hard to breed her. Name’s Frank. Echeveria. Lives in one of those
jippo sort of boxy jobs, those they built out there on O Street? Course, if it’s my
opinion you are wanting, I would say forget about another dog. Schnauzer, anyway.
But if you are stuck on them as this other fellow, then you go over there and see
him. Frank. O Street. Or P. Bitch’s name is Hope. Papered, AKC, the works. Bred her
by a stud owned by a friend of mine. Dog named Gustavus’s Imperial—called Gus—just
last week in Elko.”
Doubtless any father, having found himself in my shoes, would have seen the need to
urge upon the vet a little more discretion. Son-of-a-bitch like that—soft, drawn,
hewn of whiskered soap by sandstorms and putty knives, his clinician’s gaze at mortal
sicknesses and breakage. I motioned with my head, suggesting our withdrawal. For the
boy’s sake, I explained.
“It’s his birthday,” I was saying. “He’s distraught.”
The vet looked back to see what I believed distraught was, supposed I might be right.
He drew his glasses from his pocket, asked me if he wasn’t seeing things, or was the
boy’s one foot much bigger than the other. I told him what I could, as quickly as
I could, about my son’s one foot, his speechlessness, his glasses and his teeth, his
squarish shape, its probable origination in his mother. I told the vet that Hope was
ours. Unthinkingly, I called her Faith. I omitted my unmended fence, supplied a teenaged
driver. One minute, I explained, we were gathered in the front yard, all of us together,
posing for our Christmas portrait, and the next thing there we were, in the gutter
there with the dog, our faces in our hands, not knowing what to say or how to touch
her. A wiser soul, I said, some sage was needed here whose gift it was to parse the
breath and blood of tongueless beasts to tell the child how they had lived, when they
had lived, what finished them, and why, and where the child might think of them as
being bound to. I told the vet the boy was a believer. In the vet. I plunged ahead,
confessed that I myself began to see the vet as something of a hero from the Westerns
I recalled from youth, where our quiet, rural lives were proven indisputably to be
the possible arenas for the drastically heroic.
Naturally, our life was not that movie. In our life, the vet conducted me a little
farther from the boy and told me if it weren’t for the boy he would have showed me
to the door by the direction of his boot. He said that I was spoiled, said my mother
spoiled me, he’d seen it coming, guessed in any case that I was lying. He guessed
we never had a dog at all, guessed that dog out there was
Hope. Figured I must be my neighbor’s neighbor. Said he never trusted me. Guessed
that it was me who burned the barn down. Saw it in the shine I kept up on my boots.
Saw it in my bowtie. Allowed as how a child should not be given such a party. Asked
me whether he, the vet, looked like any kind of man with sons and daughters in the
world who turned to him to help explain it.
“No, sir,” said the vet, “I never bred because I was afraid I’d come out with the
kind that you are. You tell that boy that you’re mistaken. On your way out, you read
him that plaque on my door. Says Large Animals. You tell him what you’ve got there
is a Small.”
So in our life, the movie version, my son and I are seen departing from the vet in
search of other, older, more compliant, less encrusted heroes. I try to keep our chins
up. I allow the dog to ride inside the car, in the backseat, with the boy, who strokes
her through the Visqueen. I resume my banter, a tactic of apparently significant distraction.
How a smaller animal is different from a larger, and why the vet appeared to be unkind,
what the smell inside his office was, where I thought that we could find the nearest
potty. In our movie, I look behind me oftener than I look out front. I ask the boy
if he can feel the heat. I point out the gulls in the dump, ask him does he see the
coming heavy weather. I tell him if he’s lucky, for his birthday, in addition to the
dog, we might go get a collar. We might build a brand new fence, I say, an electric
one, to keep the dog from bolting. I crack my window, tip my nostrils to the crack,
tell my son that by the scent of things, as I recalled them, the Humane Society could
not be far.
“The pound,” I said, meaning to rein in his expectations.
And yet when I had passed us by the place, and you saw that there was the renderer’s,
and there was Lily Fong’s, you also saw
that where the pound once was were heaps and heaps of weedy rubble.
The pound,
I said,
the pound,
as if the twisted steel and broken timbers might be moved by my insistence to assemble
in the standing shapes through which I last recalled them. What else was I to say?
The rubble, the rubble, the rubble? This was, I think, lament, the great misnaming,
the mind’s displacement of the named thing from the present. Having come from so far
off my chair, I felt myself entitled, to become a little bit untidy, nostalgic to
myself, so far as speech went. The pound, what had they done to it? My wife, what
would she do to me? Or to my chair? Could she destroy my chair, a whole recliner,
with a cleaver? I had done my best. Lamentably, the pound was not a pound; the Roxy
was not the Roxy; the public pool was not the public pool; Penny’s Five and Dime had
just this year become a bank. On the other hand, I thought, why lament? A stranger
to this lot might easily perceive a resource, raw material; here, perhaps, was the
grounded image from the dreamscape of an avid sleeper. This lot might one day be a
feedstore, or a supermarket, perhaps another Roxy.
Why weep?
It occurred to me I might not need a chair; it occurred to me that men were very likely
sitting, unassisted by the chair, for countless, happily reposing generations prior
to the chair’s conception. But where was repose? And who was happy? Here was failure,
my tendency to loiter naiflike in its precincts. But I wasn’t any naif. I knew the
thing to do was to get out of the car and knock. Bid the boy sit still. Not to worry.
Run, knock, hurry back. Wife’s work, in our family, I don’t know why, but still I
did it. Got out, I mean, chanced my stature as a knowing, potent husband, a native
Winnemuccan. I took care to stride. I unpocketed my hands, let my arms swing in an
arc I thought depicted best a purposeful
insouciance. Had there been a stock of straw nearby I would have plucked it up and
chewed it. Somebody watched. Who knew who? A renderer? My son? Did Lily Fong herself
regard me through the sideslits of her paper shades? Even here, on the outskirts of
our town, where the windows were few, the desert barren, I was not unmindful of how
deeply my ablutions and deportment are descended from the wish and the fear that somebody
might see me. Or that somebody might hear me. Or might smell me. Certainly, there
have been those days when I was seated on a bench, or standing in an aisle, or maybe
waiting in a line to buy my stamps, when suddenly my body clenched, seized inward
from the region just below the buttocks, upward through the brain, recoiling from
the possibility that somebody, somehow, might accidentally touch me. What would I
betray? What could anybody know? By my skin, what? By my sound, what? What could be
determined of me through the apprehension of my shape? I wondered: Would Lily Fong
discern the bravery I intended to example by my lengthy gait? Would a renderer respect
my knock, the hardy application of my ungloved knuckles to the frozen wood? And when
he chose at last to speak, would my son recount my perseverance to my wife? my patience
with the vet? my ingenuity with Visqueen?