In Memory of Junior (6 page)

She got whipped too. For all the normal things. She got where she'd sit around behind the store and smoke cigarettes. That store had been there since way before cars, and there was a hitching post out in front of it. So . . . see, girls didn't smoke back then, nowhere, but she was going out behind the store and smoking with the storeowner's daughter, who was mean. Somebody told Papa, and he made her stand at the hitching post and smoke five cigarettes in a row for five days in a row. Every day the crowd got a little bigger and a little bigger. She stopped smoking, too.

I imagine of all the people in the family, me and her was the closest. She'd go hunting with me, and we had fights. She never forgot some of the things that happened. One time I held up a rabbit from one of my gums to show her, cause she didn't get any that morning, and that rabbit jerked loose and went running off and she fell on the ground laughing. She told about that over and over. She could actually skin a rabbit faster than I could. That's no lie. She was quicker than me in some ways, once she growed up a little bit. I'm talking about when she was around thirteen, fourteen, and I was eighteen or nineteen, before I stopped living up there and then run off after Mama married old man Harper.

Aw, there's a lot of different things that I could tell, you know, about the whole entire country around in there
and everywhere from Bethel all the way back to the old mill place and down below up the old ah, ah penitentiary place and all the way coming back into Summerlin, where we used to go and what we used to do, but it's hard to remember a lot of that stuff. And, that was before World War I.

And now here I am with my groin getting eat out. Looks like I would be allowed to go out peaceable. They say He works in mysterious ways. Well, I do too.

Tate keeps his place pretty nice. I been aiming to put up some kind of blinds, shades, in mine, something on my windows. What's hanging in my bedroom is a poncho, and when I got back from Tate's, I looked through the head hole to see if I could see that dog out back that had been barking for the last two days solid. But there's a row of bushes at the back end of the yard that hides him.

At least I never had this problem living at the motel. Didn't have to worry about no curtains either.

I headed for the kitchen, got a beer.

I was thinking.

Few minutes later, I stood on their porch and knocked on their screen door. I saw them moving in a couple of weeks ago.

One window on each side of the front door. The window shades were pulled down—gold colored. A TV was on somewhere in there. I opened the screen door and knocked. The door come open on its own.

I stuck my head in. TV noises from in there in that first
room on the left. Fishing gear was on the floor of a hall that ran front to back. I closed the door behind me, tried to see what make the fishing reels were—one was a Penn. I knocked on the door to the room.

This voice from inside: “Yeah?”

“I need to talk to somebody.”

“Just a minute.” The door opened. Short, stocky man, reddish hair, scrawny mustache—little clusters of red hairs like. “What do you want?” he says.

“I got a complaint. That dog out back's about to drive me crazy. He's been barking for—”

“It's my brother's, but he's asleep. He'll be leaving in a week or so, and he'll take the dog with him. So you don't have nothing to worry about.”

The guy was acting like, hey, no big deal. But for
me
it
was.
So I said, “Well, you go wake him up, because something's got to give here. That dog's driving me crazy.” He had already started shutting the door.

“Hey,” he said, opening the door again. “He's got a nerve problem. I can't bother him right now.”

“Can't
bother—”

“You live around here?” He looked over his shoulder at the TV.

“Yeah. I live right out there.”

“Well, he's asleep now, and I ain't waking him up. He's pretty nervous.”

“Look, man, either somebody shuts up the dog, or I shut up the dog. I don't have to sit in my own house and be disturbed by some dog after I give a warning. This is a warning. Okay? I mean this has been going on two whole days and nights. It's driving me crazy.”

This is the kind of situation where Uncle Grove would kick ass. I been with him when he did.

“Give me your phone number,” he says. He could see I was serious. He writes down my phone number on a newspaper.

“If I ain't heard from him by five o'clock,” I say, “I'll figure nothing ain't going to be done.”

“I'll give him the number,” he says. “He'll call.”

So I come on back home and I'm thinking: I go out and talk to this guy. Right? He acts like I'm the one bothering
him.
He's mouthing off at
me.
Now ain't this something? This is the guy with the barking dog. And who's mouthing off at who? There's people like this all over the world. They don't think about nothing but theirselves. They're everywhere, and when you bring it to their attention, they go all to pieces. And a bigger problem is the people that let them get by with it. You got jerks all over the place that won't say nothing to these kind of assholes. They'd rather get run all over. They'd rather avoid a little trouble. They're what's wrong with this country.

I got my twelve-gauge Remington automatic out of the closet, found a box of shells, buckshot, in the top dresser drawer, got out seven, dropped them on the bed. By god, if I did end up shooting this dog, the dog wouldn't just be dead. He'd be dead dead. I wouldn't do nothing like this half-ass.

The Remington is my daddy's. Was my daddy's. He probably didn't use it no more than eight or ten times in his life. He gave it to me after he got sick this last time. Last long time. He took me quail hunting a few times when I was little, but hell, I did more stuff like that with Uncle
Grove in the six months I stayed with him than I did with my daddy all my life. Hunting, fishing, stuff like that.

Uncle Grove used to have a bunch of guns. He's still got that one that was handed down—the double-barrel with the old-fashioned hammers, handed down from his daddy, my mama's daddy—the gun that was in a fight at a liquor still, got hit with buckshot. Uncle Grove told me that story a bunch of times. His daddy had to pick buckshot out of this nigger's head. Black man.

Mama told me some stuff, too. I remember her letting me sew one time—stick a needle with a white thread through a button hole. And I remember her chasing me around the house one time, and driving me to town in a car. She was pretty.

Phone rang. “Hello.” It was the guy with the dog. Okay, I thought, let's see what's coming down here.

“You the one wanted me to call you?”

“Yeah. That dog has been barking for two solid days and nights, and it's driving me crazy.”

“I think I can get him quiet,” he says.

“That's good,” I said. “You want to take him in the house, fine. It ain't my problem. But if I have to, I'll—”

“Where you located?”

“Out your back door and to the left. That's my house.” No way to meet this kind of thing but head-on, so I said, “I'll meet you out at the bushes there if you want to.”

So I go on out there and when I
see
this guy, I say, “You're the same guy!”

“Nah,” he says. “He's my twin brother.”

“You ain't the same one?” They looked exactly alike.

“No way. Now look here,” he says, “the dog was just barking, that's all.”

“I know he was just barking. That's what he's been doing for two days and nights. That's the problem.”

The dog starts yelping. Right then and there. So the guy acts a little nervous.

I yell, “Shut up!”

The dog stops barking. The guy looks at me, at the dog. “Good boy,” he says to the dog.

There was a break in the bushes—a path. “Let me see the dog,” I said. “I know something about dogs.” I do, too. I walked on through.

The dog was in one side of a double garage. A motorboat was in the other side, where the sun shined in, propped up on a little refrigerator. The dog was standing in the shady part, breathing vapor, chain running from his collar through a hole in the back of the garage and all these cages the size of suitcases laying around in there.

Dog wagged his tail, pranced on his front paws. I put out my fist. The dog licked it. “It's a Doberman,” I said, squatting down. “Or mostly Doberman.”

Another
dog, a pointer—liver and white—stood up from behind the boat. He stretched and shook off all over. “Whose pointer?” I said. “He's right pretty.”

“Jimmy's. I bought them both, gave Jimmy the bird dog. He
is
pretty.”

“Looks like a bird dog I used to have. I was going to give my boy a bird dog.”

“What happened?”

“He died,” I said.

“I had a pit bull die on me three, four years ago. But he'd been eat up pretty good before I bought him.”

“My boy died,” I said.

“Damn. I'm sorry. What happened? Or . . . you know.”

“Car wreck.” I didn't want to get into all that. “You hunt any?”

“Used to. But I quit shooting the birds. What's your name?”

“Faison.”

“I quit shooting the birds, Faison. You know, got tired of it. But Jimmy still hunts. Goes all the time.”

Right here I thought, man. Here's a bird dog—good-looking bird dog. Here's somebody at my back door that likes to hunt birds. I hadn't been hunting in a long, long time. “What are all those cages for?” I couldn't figure that one out.

“Snakes. Jimmy's a snake handler. Does shows for schools and stuff.”

“Has he got any in there? Maybe that's why—”

“Naw, he's out of snakes right now. He lets them out under the neighbors' houses.”

“What? He
what?”

“Just kidding. He sells them, lets them out in the woods, different stuff. He's supposed to be getting some new ones. Jimmy don't stay out of snakes long.” He patted the bird dog's head, looked at me. “He says he's going bird hunting in the morning. Try out that dog. Dog's been broke. Think you might want to go?”

“Well. Yeah, I'll go bird hunting. I'll go bird hunting.”

The pointer had good blood. You could tell. A beautiful dog. “But we got to do something about this other one's barking,” I said.

“We'll work something out. We'll bring him inside if he keeps it up. His name is Cactus. Hey,
Jimmy,”
he yelled.

Jimmy came to the back door. They
were
twins.

“What's up?” says Jimmy.

“This guy—what's your name again?”

“Faison.”

“Faison wants to go hunting with you in the morning. He's a old bird hunter.”

“Sure. Come on out about six-thirty. I need somebody to go with me. Timmy won't go. He got saved or something. Something happened.”

“I just decided to stop shooting the birds. That's all.”

“I'll be here,” I said. “I hope he's a good dog.”

“He's a good dog. He better be.”

Then they took the Doberman inside.

That was about as simple as you could ask for. Stand your ground, don't blink, nine times out of ten things will work out for you.

Since me and Faison broke up I've moved twice, but the place I got now, I like best. It's an apartment in the basement of a nice two-story home in Cherry Hill Acres. I got my own entrance, kitchen, parking place. And out back is a little patch of woods that's real nice. I've been walking out there some.

It seems like me and Faison can't get around to a divorce. Everybody else I know,
everybody,
has been divorced. Faison's brother, too. I liked his wife all right. We ate over there some. She got the house. Their boy is weird, and I think that kind of comes from her, actually.

Faison or me don't really want a divorce, so we keep seeing
each other—here and there, one way or another. Since Junior died, it's been hard. That car wreck was the event of my life, and I did some counseling with Preacher Gordon, but it got to be the same kind of thing over and over, the counseling. I do think he helped me in some ways. But some things you just can't change.

To let you know about how we are together—me and Faison—it's almost like the last fight we had. It's almost like that explains it.

We were out in the backyard in broad daylight. “It was a promise!” he yelled. Screaming. “You promised to change his name. It was a goddamned promise!” He just kept yelling this over and over, about the
name.
Like Junior was
his,
and like that dumb name change was more important than anything else. He was acting crazy.

I slapped him, I had to, and screamed right back at him, “He was mine, you son of a bitch. You don't have no rights in any of this.”

He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward the garage. I tried to get away. He was acting crazier than I'd ever seen him.

He got me in the tool room—off the garage—and while I was scrambling to get back out I grabbed a shelf beside the door and it pulled down and stuff started falling all around us and I felt him ease up, soften up, come to his senses and right there I realized with some kind of jolt that I was there in that tool room with the only person in the world I had. The only one. And in that minute that everything was falling down in the tool shed, I just reached down and put my hand on Faison, you know, like I used to do when we were playing around. We always played
around a lot. And he melted. Right there in the tool room. Then he won't melted, if you know what I mean. And for a minute I turned loose all he'd done with the lies when we got married. See, Faison was all I had in the world, except God. That's one of the things I couldn't straighten out with Preacher Gordon. If God reasons out things that happen, like they say at church, He didn't have no reason to let that happen to us, Junior getting killed in a car wreck, with me driving. No God could ever have a reason for letting that happen.