THE SIXTY-FIFTH DAY . . .
(Saturday, August 15, after midnight)
MACK:
We’ve been in the
bathroom since noon. I’m panicking now. Boo paces, holding in his
water. He will not go near that drain.
“Boo,” she says. “Pee.”
Boo circles the roof and squats over the rain drain and
pees.
Céce lets out with a scream and that little snort that’s
in her laugh sometimes.
Knocking.
“Yep?”
“Mack, I’d like to
talk with you a minute, if you can spare one,” Wash
says.
“Yessir.
Course.”
The door cracks open
and Boo blows through the slot, fairly knocking over Wash. He lets
a good half gallon go on that tabletop. When he’s done, he hops
down to me, sits nice and gives me his paw.
Wash clears his
throat. “How’s the paper training coming?”
“Working out a few
kinks, but we’re gettin’ there.” I get to cleaning up the mess.
Can’t get Wash to stop helping me. He’s in his street clothes, hair
like he got woken up with a late-night phone call, like Tony’s that
night he came to save me and my pittie girl out by the highway.
Wash’s wife has got to hate me. Tony must hate me
more.
Boo grabs the paper
towels from my hand to get me to chase him.
“Now, I’m not
criticizing you, okay?” Wash says. “I’m just a bit concerned about
you holing up in the bathroom with that Boo there for so
long.”
“Wash, trust me, this
is the only way to get this variety of dog to spot
pee.”
“Spot
pee?”
I explain it to
him.
He listens real
close. When I’m done, he nods. “Well then, I am satisfied that you
know what you are doing.”
“I won’t let you
down.”
“I know you won’t.
Let’s have a little sit-down.” He pours from a Sprite bottle into
two cups. “Son, you don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Oh, I want to do it
all right.”
“It’s a lot of
pressure—”
“No pressure, Wash. I
love it. Gonna be fine.”
“I feel I might have
put you in a jam, you know?”
“Sir?”
“Your young lady
friend there. Got to be hard on you. You have a lot going on,
trying to work that out. Now you have the dog here. Are you sure
this Boo here is trainable?”
“Positive.” I look at
Boo. On my look, he jumps me and knocks me out of my chair and
pastes me with slobber. I tell him “Sit,” and he sits on my chest,
all ninety pounds of him. I brush his coat with forked fingers. It
calms him down. “Wash, could I ask you something along the lines of
a question?”
“Go ahead,
son.”
“Your wife,” I say.
“What color is her hair?”
He blinks a couple,
and then he sips his soda. “Well, she dyes it
blond-ish.”
I nod. “You ever see
those folks who comb the beaches with those metal detectors? This
couple I saw, they would go to the shore every night.”
“How’d they make
out?”
“They’d find bottle
caps and rusty nails, like that, but never anything
good.”
“Hm.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Not
sure why I told you that.”
“Well, let’s figure
it out. Why’d you tell me that?”
“I guess I was just
thinking, like, when you tell your wife a secret, and you have no
doubt that she’ll keep it forever, that’s kind of like finding
buried treasure, right?”
“I believe it is,”
Wash says. “I believe it is exactly that.”
“How many kids you
all got, Wash?”
“Three. I’m sorry,
two. My oldest died in the war. Just last year.”
“I see.”
“He was a chopper
pilot. Twenty-eight years old. His craft went down secondary to
equipment failure.”
“I’m real sorry,
Wash. Sorry I made you talk about it too. Him, I
mean.”
“You didn’t make me,
and I don’t mind talking about him, so don’t you trouble yourself.
His name was Ezekiel.”
“I like that name a
ton.”
“We nicked him
Zeke.”
I nod. “I have a
friend training to go over there. Army. He’s got to be into his
seventh week of basic by now. Probably the best dude I ever
knew.”
“How’s he making out
down there?”
“Dunno.”
Wash
nods.
We sip our Sprites
and you can tell there’s nothing left to say, so I say, “Maybe I
ought to get back to work.”
“All right
then.”
“Wash?”
“Yup?”
“Thanks for worrying
about me.”
“I’m not worried, and
you shouldn’t be either. I’m a hundred percent certain you are
going to do well by Boo here. Now, you go and train your dog as you
see fit.”
I feed Boo more
peanut butter. He drains a bowl of water. He scratches at the door
to get at his tabletop. I do my thing, act like a dog, pee into the
drain, and Boo just slumps flat and groans. We fall asleep curled
into each other. I wake up to Boo licking my eyes.
I wonder what I would
do if she came to visit one last time.
Boo whimpers to be
let out of the bathroom.
(Saturday, August 15, morning)
CÉCE:
I dust off my bike
and hit the road. Steamy rain escorts me to the VA hospital, uphill
all the way. I lock my bike to the handicap rail that zigzags to
the main entrance. Not that anyone would steal the piece of crap.
Anthony put it together from junk parts. I have a sissy
bar.
“I want to
volunteer.”
“Need to beef up the
résumé for those college apps, right?” Nurse Nasty
says.
“Truth?”
“If it’s
available.”
“I want to be a good
person.”
“You’re not now?” she
says.
“No. Now I’m a
self-centered mope.”
“Interesting. What
are your skills, besides moping?”
“I’m good at making
pizza. Maybe I could teach a class?”
“Or maybe you could
wheel the veterans out to the garden and sit with them and read the
paper to the blind ones.”
“Cool. I don’t mean
cool.” I take the application to the
waiting room and turn to this guy sitting at the end of the row of
chairs. “ ’ Scuse me, you got a pen?”
He’s not in a chair
but a wheelchair. In a hospital gown. “Is it winter yet?” he says.
He’s staring out the window, at the lush trees snapping around in
the hot wind.
I have to get out of
here.
Some lady in a
wheelchair yells at me for locking my bike to the handicap
ramp.
I pedal to the animal
shelter, or halfway there, until my pedal breaks. I walk the
godforsaken bike the rest of the way, uphill, wondering if I should
just leave it on a corner for somebody to take, except who would
take a bike that was garbage even when it had two working pedals? I
open the shelter door, and it’s hotter inside than out on the
street. Barking and crying. And the stink. They make me watch this
ten-minute video and hand me a pooperscooper. All pit bulls here.
Scraggly, as Mack would say. Eyes open too wide, ears back but not
soft, pinned flat. They have seven days to be adopted. Most won’t
be.
One kind of looks
like Boo, but she’s wild. I take her out for a walk, and she nearly
pulls me into speeding traffic. I try to do all the things he
showed me, get her to walk behind me, to heel, but I’m no Mack
Morse. I just don’t have the gift. Any dog I get will have to come
trained, except who can afford a dog trainer?
I try to dream it
every night, dream him, but it feels
more and more like a movie I think I’ve seen before. Somebody
else’s story. I still remember his eyes, though. The way he looked
at me that last night, when we were together in the alley, the rain
smashing us. He looked into my eyes for such a long time, not
saying a word. I kept saying “What? What are you looking at?” And
he just had that sad smile, and he was shaking his head, and he
kept looking.
I bring the dog into
the shelter by the back alley. This dude is dragging garbage bags
to the Dumpster. Ten or so. “They’re triple-bagged,” he
says.
“What?” I
say.
“You look like you’re
worried they’ll spill out.”
I press the leash
into the man’s hand and I run. My brother is about to head overseas
and wade through carnage, and I can’t find the courage to work at
an animal shelter. I suck. On the upside, somebody stole my
bike.
I hike home. If
riding from home to the VA to the shelter was uphill the whole way,
how is that when I backtrack the exact route home, it’s all still
uphill? And how do you ride a bike and hike for two hours, sweat
the whole time, don’t eat or drink anything, and you still gain a
pound? My ass is killing me.
I head down to the
highway to bring Cashew Man a PBJ sandwich and an eight-pack of
Costco tuna for the cats, but he isn’t here anymore.
(Saturday, August 15, afternoon)
MACK:
After twenty-some
hours cooped together in the bathroom, me and Boo know each other
pretty good. He sits fine now, gives double paw, goes to his belly
for cookies, then for a scratch under his jaw, then just a sweet
word. What I cannot get this dog to do is pee anywhere but on top
of that table.
“Boo.”
He cocks his head,
puts his nose under my elbow, and flips up my arm for me to pet
him.
“Where you from, boy?
What’ve you seen?”
He licks my Adam’s
apple.
I massage the scars
around his torn-up ear. “You lived a thing or two, huh? How you
stay so happy, man? How you forget the bad stuff?”
He cocks his head the
other way and puts his huge paw on my chest. He trembles from tail
wagging, has to be three hundred switches a minute.
“How you make friends
so fast and deep, man? I’d tell you that you ought to be careful
about that, but it would ruin you. Hurts, though. Get ready.” Then
I stop talking, because talking too much to a dog only confuses
him.
Why’d I let myself
fall in love with her when I knew we never should be together?
Why’d I let her love me back? She never said the words, but she
wore that stickpin every change of shirt. Still, would have been
beautiful to hear her say it.
Boo looks from my
right eye to my left and back, and I swear he’s reading my mind. He
nudges my chin with his nose.
“What you want, boy?
You want a cookie?” I dunk one in peanut butter, and he takes it
nice and polite and tosses it to the side.
“What’s up, boy? You
want to go out and tag your table again, right?” I open the door to
swing him out to the caged-in porch, but this time he won’t leave
the bathroom. He sits on my foot and looks up at me.
I crouch close to him
to look into his eyes, but I can’t read him. “I don’t know what you
want, boy.”
He wiggles himself
into me so I have to hug him, and when I do, he rests his head at
my neck and sighs. I swear this dog is the easy side of God. When I
stroke his shoulders, he sighs happiness, and I believe this is
what he wants me to know: That this right here, this minute of him
and me being lumped up on a prison bathroom floor is all we need,
and more than anything we could ever want. That’s when I hear,
“Mister Morse.”
Thompkins points for
me to sit. Wash sits next to me. Boo jumps up into my lap to lick
my ears.
“The animal is not
supposed to be in the chair,” Thompkins says.
“Down.”
Boo pops down to
wrestle my sneaker. I claw him till he goes over for a belly
scratch, farting up a peanut butter cloud, tell you
what.
Thompkins stares at
me. Frowns. Left hand hidden in his right. “What’s this
spot peeing business? Hey, don’t turn
away from me.”
And here it comes,
the hissing.
“The training manuals
very specifically tell you how to paper train the animal. The
pictures show you how to do it. I could not have made it simpler.
Did you study the manual, the part about laying out a ten by ten
foot square of newspaper?”
“Boo won’t go on
paper, sir.”
“After you
feed him, he will have to eliminate. You walk him to the paper—”
“He holds it
in.”
Thompkins squints.
“The guard told me you are trying to get the animal to eliminate in
the shower drain. He says you are trying to show the animal by
example, acting like a dog as you do.”
“Mister Thompkins,”
Wash says. “This young man is special. He understands these dogs in
ways you and I can’t. Give him another chance.”
Thompkins eyes Boo,
then me. “If the dog is not eliminating on the paper, then where is
he eliminating?”
By now Boo’s sniffing
the table.
“I’m cleaning it up
real good,” I say.
“Mister Morse, I asked you a question. You are evading it, and there you go again, pinching your
wrist.”
Boo trots around the
table.
“Boo, come,” I
say.
But he’s up on the
table and letting loose, splattering me, Wash, and Thompkins. When
he finishes he crawls into my lap and yawns and nuzzles his way to
sleep.
“Mister
Thompkins—”
He silences me with a
wave of his hand. He grabs some paper towels and wipes his arms,
careful to hide his left hand. He makes a note into his book and
packs up his case. “Gentlemen, I have worked very hard to develop
this program. Nowhere in the protocol books I gave Mister Morse
does it say the boy and the animal should be hiding out in a
bathroom for twenty-odd hours. Nor is there anything in the books
about training the dog to eliminate on top of a table.”
“Listen,” Wash says.
“If you boot this kid from the program, he’s going back into the
tent. This is a very sensitive young man.”
“They’re all sensitive, Sergeant.”
“Agreed, but this
fellow has a hard time hiding his
sensitivity. He has a contract out on him. Then again, I suppose
you don’t know about the tent, do you, Mister
Thompkins?”
“Actually, Sergeant,
I do. And I am genuinely sorry for Mister Morse’s predicament. But
what you and Mister Morse need to understand is that I have to
deliver these dogs to our veterans. I don’t know if you are aware
of it, but there is a war on.”
“I am aware of that
fact, sir.” Wash frowns that one away. “Give the boy another couple
of days.”
“We would only be
delaying the inevitable.”
“Give him till
tomorrow.”
Thompkins heads for
the cell door. “To process the termination paperwork will take that
long anyway. Will you please inform the assistant warden he will be
hearing from me tomorrow morning?” The guard opens the cage door
and lets the man out.
“Son?” Wash says.
“Seems to me you have until tomorrow morning to get that dog
housebroken. Can you do it?”
The building
trembles. I look out the window. An older, noisier 747 just clears
the dome. Boo is playing chase with a big black fly.
Another guard comes
to the bars. “Morse. Visitor.”
“He reminds me of
you,” I say.
“Yeah?” Vic
says.
“He’s real cool, but
he’s sneaky. Wash isn’t afraid to bend the rules a
little.”
“Sounds like a great
man. Potent, this Old Dogs thing. You found your
calling.”
“Had to get locked up
to do it.”
“You’ll be out sooner
than you think,” Vic says.
“So I been
told.”
“By people who aren’t
locked up, right? When you get out, you come see me. I’ll help you
get that dog training company started. You’ll make us
millionaires.”
I study him: pushing
seventy. He isn’t in great shape at all. Twenty-five years from
now? “I appreciate that, man. Thank you.” My lips are
trembling.
“Hey?” he says.
“What’s up?”
“Things aren’t
looking great right now.”
“They never do, till
they’re great,” he says. “You watch: You’re gonna be
okay.”
He thinks I’m upset
because I’m locked up. Better to let him think it’s that. He can’t
help me with the fact Thompkins is about to fire me. “Tell me more
about Tony.”
“He says he wants you
to know he’s there for you.”
I look away. “Tell
him I said thank you.”
Vic nods for a while.
“I need a favor.”
“Anything,
man.”
“Just for a few
minutes, I need you to let Céce sit with you.”
“Anything but
that.”
“This is a matter of
honor. Hers. Yours. One last visit. You need to do
this.”
“Vic, ten minutes
ago, when they said I had a visitor, I was ready to cartwheel down
here. But now I got my senses back. I can’t see her. She’s almost
through it. The forgetting. Why stir up all the feelings again when
her and me can never be together?”
“Because you need to
say good-bye,” he says. “I don’t tell somebody to do something
unless I’m one hundred percent sure it’s—”
“Look, man, I have to
get back to my dog.”
“You’re gonna see
her, kid, whether you like it or not.”
“Damn, man, my
plate’s full, okay? I appreciate you coming down here, but just
leave it alone, all right?” I fish my pocket for that letter I
wrote, and I push it across the table to Vic. “For
Tony.”
“Kid, there’s three
ways to do things: the wrong way, the right way, and my way. Wrong
way: Make her hate you. Right way: Be a gentleman and sit with her
for ten minutes, let her say what she needs to say.”
“And your
way?”
“You don’t want to
know.”
I kick back out of my
chair and slam it into the table, and I’m so gone.
(Saturday, August 15, just before dinner
shift)
CÉCE:
Bobby drops a tray of
glasses. “Yup, yes, yet again,” he says. Five minutes later, he
spills ice all over the kitchen floor. “I am so sorry about that.
It’s an age-old problem.”
If you’re a certified
klutz, why would you seek employment in a restaurant, which is
pretty much about carrying stuff from one place to another without
spilling it? He’s an excellent cheesecake pal, though. We go into
the walk-in and eat and we don’t care that we’re licking our
fingers in front of each other. A minute later Ma’s in with us,
because the air conditioner is broken again. She’s sipping iced
coffee, hungover but sober for half a day and still promising to
stay that way. A minute later Vic comes in, and he’s huffing and
sweating.
“What happened to
you?” Ma says.
“Car broke down
again. Get this: The tow truck crapped out. He had to get a tow. And when he dropped the Olds
at the gas station, it started.”
“You just have to hit
it really hard with a cinderblock,” Ma says. “Passenger side, front
quarter panel. It restarts like maybe thirty-five percent of the
time. I left the brick in the trunk.”
“Good to
know.”
“You need help
unloading the stuff?” I say.
“What stuff?” Vic
says.
“The Costco
crap.”
“Yeah, no, it was too
crowded. I’ll go tomorrow. Hand me a piece of cake there,
kid.”
Bobby reaches for the
box and knocks over a bucket of mushrooms soaking in wine. “Yup,
yes, yet again. I am so sorry about that.”
The new waitress
cracks the door.
“Grab a spot of
Parmesan wheel, Jeannie,” Ma says.
“Um, Carmella, I . .
.” She opens the door, and this older guy is standing there. He’s
in a U.S. Army uniform. The nametag. Anthony’s recruiter. He
searches our faces and decides my mother is the person he’s looking
for. “Mrs. Vaccuccia?”
“No,” Ma says.
“Please, no.”
And then I hear
myself saying, “The hell are you doing here? He’s still in boot
camp. It isn’t time yet.”
My big brother, my
mother’s only son, Anthony James Vaccuccia, was “seriously
injured.” Part of his face was burned in the explosion, though that
wound is supposedly minor. Also burned were two fingers on his
right hand, the one that launched how many touchdowns I can’t
remember. Those burns were so bad, the fingers had to be amputated,
along with his legs, which were pulverized. Shrapnel lacerated his
larynx, but doctors are hopeful that surgery will restore part of
my brother’s voice box.
No roadside bomb in
some faraway land. No grenade. No sniper fire aimed at a Humvee gas
tank. An insanely random accident. No one to blame, except
Anthony.
My brother and his
platoon were leaving their barracks for a workout. A maintenance
vehicle crashed into the barracks. The old man behind the wheel was
having a heart attack. Anthony being Anthony went to help the old
man. The truck was on fire, but Anthony couldn’t—no, wouldn’t—leave
the man. The truck door jammed in the crash. Anthony was climbing
into the truck to kick out the door when the fire lit up a propane
tank.
I did not see this
coming. I can only conclude, definitively, that ESP is a crock of
shit.
Vic closes the
restaurant for the night and drives us home—after Ma smashes the
engine with the cinderblock. Vic takes the long way, for some
reason, all the way around the reservoir. We’re riding for a while,
nobody saying anything, until Ma says, “You guys mind I put on the
radio?”
“Course not,
sweetheart,” Vic says.
Ma rolls the ancient
dial to the community college station for Punk Hour. DJ sounds like
he’s huffing lighter fluid. Between the commercials a song
occasionally comes on, this really old hard-edged music, The Clash,
Iggy Pop, The Ramones. The station fades to crackles every time Vic
makes a turn, and Ma constantly retunes the dial. She starts
singing along with this band called Suicide. The song’s called
“Dream Baby Dream,” and the singer keeps telling us that our dreams
will keep us free. Sure they will.
I reach over the seat
and click off the radio. “How can you stand it, Ma?”
“It makes me feel
good,” she says. And that’s all anybody says until we pull up to
the house and Vic pats our arms and nods. “It’s all gonna be
okay.”
“How you figure
that?” I say.
“I just know it.”
Vic’s face is pocked and gray and fragile in the shade-side light.
We go into the kitchen. Vic makes coffee.
Anthony is
unconscious in post-op recovery, but apparently he’s stable. We
can’t go down and see him yet, because they might have to move him
to another hospital. Do I even want to
go down and see him? Will I recognize him?
I head upstairs for a
shower, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. I just sit there in
my towel, on the floor of the upstairs bathroom, the same floor
Grumpy died on. I flip through what I was flipping through while on
the toilet this morning, when my life only sucked: a magazine,
Bark, for dog lovers. It came in the
mail yesterday, from Anthony. He picked it up at the PX for Mack.
Could I leave it with him next time I visited?
No, I can’t. Mack
gets what he wants: He’s dead.
His absence leaves me
with plenty of shoulders to cry on, plenty of people to tell me
everything will be okay, but no one to believe. He did exactly what
he promised he’d never do: He left me stranded.
I’m looking out the
bathroom window. It’s still light out, but the streetlights are on,
and the gnats are swarming.