Dog Run Moon (7 page)

“Yeah, you know why I started?”

“It is a question I had considered asking. Why?”

“Because what's the point of not smoking? I've been not smoking for thirty-three years. Look at where it has gotten me. Now I'm going to be smoking. Make sense?”

“Perfectly.”

“Okay, I'm going to let you go, very tired.”

“Okay.”

“Love.”

“Love.”

“Love.”

Kat's lips brushed his ear in her whisper. He hung up the phone. He was a scalped and bloody mess.

Before dawn Perry woke to find Kat's side of the bed empty. He turned and saw her standing over him in the dark, fully clothed in jeans and T-shirt. She brought her fingers to his face and smoothed his mustache. When she moved her head down to him her hair folded like black wings around them.

In the morning Perry crammed the uniform, now smelly and stained, into his suitcase and gave a final look around the room to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything. He put the empty bottle of J&B in the trash can. When he went out to the parking lot, he found a fluorescent orange aluminum arrow shaft protruding from the rear passenger tire of his Camry. Perry considered the arrow for a moment and then pulled it, with some difficulty, from the tire. The fletches were glued-on pieces of hot pink vinyl. The shaft had the word
WHACKMASTER
printed down the sides, and black squiggly lines, which, coupled with the orange, were supposed to give the appearance of tiger stripes. The edges of the broadhead were chipped and rusty. Perry got the donut tire from the trunk and switched out the flat. He put the arrow in the backseat and left the War Bonnet driving slowly on the small spare.

The only repair shop in Crow Agency was Robidoux's Fix-it, a lean-to built off the back of a double-wide trailer. Perry pulled in and Ted Robidoux came down the trailer steps in his bathrobe running his hand through his short black hair. Ted occasionally rode in the reenactment. Three years ago he had taken care of a clogged fuel line in Perry's car.

“Morning, Ted. It's Perry. Remember me, the General?”

“Hey, Perry. Of course. I didn't make the reenactment this year. How did it go?”

“Well, it was a spectacle, as always.”

“Good. Good. Looks like you got a bum wheel there. This country's hard on tires.”

“And other things.”

“Ha, well, I should be able to handle the tire at least. Let me go put my pants on.”

He went into the trailer and reemerged clothed, with a mug of coffee that he handed to Perry. “Take a seat,” he said. “This could take a few.”

Perry sat on the porch and sipped at the hot coffee. It was still early and cool and the land seemed refreshed from yesterday's rain. There was a stack of freshly cut lodgepoles leaning up against the trailer wall, and after he had finished his coffee, Perry went over to take a closer look. He was running his hand over their smooth, peeled surfaces when Ted came from the lean-to.

“Hey,” he said, “you like my new poles? I just finished peeling those yesterday. Last time we went to the mountains and put up the good ol' lodge I had two poles break in the middle of the night. You should have seen how pissed my old lady was when the whole thing came down on us and we had to sleep in the cab of the truck.”

“Well, you did a good job with these,” Perry said. “They're smooth. I can't imagine doing it myself. I can't even peel a potato.”

“The secret's a sharp drawknife. And a light hand. And practice.” Ted patted one of the lodgepoles and laughed. “Ah yes,” he said. “The good ol' tipi.” Then he patted the side of his trailer and laughed again. “And here's the new tipi. I got a leaky roof. Fuck me. Well, anyway, we got her patched—the tire. A good-sized hole.”

“Thanks. It was the damnedest thing. I had an arrow sticking out of it this morning.”

“An arrow? Like a good ol' Indian arrow?”

“Not exactly.”

Perry got the arrow and handed it to Ted, who held it between two fingers as if it were something particularly distasteful.

“Whackmaster?” he said.

“I have no idea.”

“Well, you know what we need to do, Perry?”

“What?”

“Back in the old days, if a warrior got hit by an arrow he had to break the shaft to make sure the guy who shot him didn't still have power over him. So his wound would heal.” Ted handed the arrow back to Perry.

“Really?”

“Sure. I'm an Indian. I know what I'm talking about when it comes to situations like this.”

“Okay. How should I do it? Is there, like, a certain way it should be done?”

“I think just over the knee, like a piece of kindling for the fire.”

Perry brought the shaft down over his knee. The aluminum didn't break, but bent sharply. He looked up at Ted, who shrugged. Perry bent it back and forth a few times and eventually the shaft broke cleanly, like a paper clip.

“There,” said Ted. “Now you keep that forever.”

T
here were cats in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters—some thin and misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed.

“Get rid of the damn things,” August's father said. “The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You've been after me for school money? I'll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife? You have it sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board and then after a few days, we'll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it's all the same.”

The cats—calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny—sat among the hay bales scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before, but—like most farm boys—he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the same rules of husbandry as those that governed man's relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain—they knew they could expect to feel a man's boot if they came too close, in return they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them.

A dollar a tail. August thought of the severed appendages, pressed and dried, stacking up like currency in the teller drawer of some strange martian bank. Fifty dollars at least, maybe even seventy-five, possibly even a hundred if he was able to track down the newborn litters.

He went to the equipment shed to look for weapons. It was a massive structure, large enough to fit a full-sized diesel combine, made of metal posts skinned with corrugated sheet metal. August liked to go there when it rained. He thought it was like being a small creature deep in the bowels of a percussion instrument. The fat drops of rain would hit the thin metal skin in an infinite drumroll punctuated by the clash of lightning cymbals and the hollow booming of space.

In the pole barn there was a long, low workbench covered in the tangled intestine of machinery. Looping coils of compressor hoses, hydraulic arms leaking viscous fluid, batteries squat and heavy, baling twine like ligaments stitching the whole crazy mess together, tongue-and-ball trailer knobs, mason jars of rusting bolts and nuts and screws, a medieval looking welder's mask, and, interspersed amongst the other wreckage like crumpled birds, soiled leather gloves in varying degrees of decomposition. August picked up a short length of rusted, heavy-linked logging chain and swung it a few times experimentally before discarding it. He put on a pair of too-large gloves and hefted a broadsword-sized mower blade, slicing slow patterns in the air, before discarding it. Then he uncovered a four-foot-long spanner wrench, a slim stainless steel handle that swelled at the end into a glistening and deadly crescent head. He brought the head down into his glove several times to hear the satisfying whack. He practiced a few horrendous death-dealing swing techniques—the sidearm full-swing golf follow-through, the overhead back-crushing axe strike, the short, quick, line-drive baseball check swing—the wrench head making ragged divots in the hard-packed dirt floor. He worked up a light sweat, and then shouldered his weapon, put the pair of gloves in his back pocket, and went to see his mother.

The old house was set back against a low, rock-plated hill. A year-round spring wept from the face of the rock, and the dampness of it filled the house with the smell of wet leaves and impending rain. The house was a single-level ranch, low slung like a dog crouching to avoid a kick. August's mother's parents had built the house with their own hands, and lived in it until they died. The old house looked up at the new house, the one August's father had finished the year after August was born. The new house was tall with a sharp-peaked roof. It had white shutters, a full wraparound porch. August's grandparents had both died before he was born and the first thing his father had done when the farm became his was sell fifty acres of fallow pasture and build the new house.

“He feels like it's his own,” August's mother had said to him once, smoking in the kitchen of the new house. “His people didn't have much. Everything we got came from my side, you know. He would never admit it in a hundred years, but it bothers him.” She coughed. “It's too big. That was my complaint from the get-go. It's hard to heat, too, exposed up on the hill like this, the wind gets in everywhere. My father would have never done it like that. He built a smart house for himself and my mother, but, that's the type of man he was.”

August tapped the door a few times with the wrench and went inside. The old house was built by folks interested in efficiency, not landscape, and the windows were few and small. The kitchen was dimly lit by a single shaft of light coming through the window over the sink. The room smelled like frying bacon, and the radio was on. Paul Harvey was extolling the virtues of a Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed.
At my age there are few things I appreciate more than a night of restful sleep. Get this mattress. It was dreamed up by a team of scientists. It's infinitely adjustable. Your dreams will thank you.

“Augie, my fair son, how does the day find you?”

His mother was at the kitchen table playing solitaire. A pan of thinly sliced potatoes fried with pieces of bacon and onion sat next to her ashtray. She smoked Swisher Sweets cigarillos, and a thin layer of smoke was undulating above her head like a smooth, gray flying carpet waiting for a charge to transport.

“I made lunch and it smelled so good while it was cooking, but then found myself suddenly not hungry. I don't know, I may have finally broken through.”

August pulled out a chair and sat across from his mother at the small table. “Broken through to what?” he said.

“Oh, I didn't tell you? I've been devoting myself to a new teaching.” She stubbed out her cigarillo, and shook another from the pack sitting on the table. She lit it, a fine network of lines appearing around her mouth as she pursed her lips. Her nails were long and gray, her fingertips jaundiced with tobacco stain. “Yeah,” she continued, “I've become an inediate.”

“A what?”

“An inediate, you know, a breatharian?”

“I don't know what that is.”

“Air eaters? Sky swallowers? Ether ingesters?”

“Nope.”

“You can attune your mind and your body, Augie. Perfectly attune them by healthy living and meditation so that you completely lose the food requirement. I mean, not just that you're no longer hungry—that's not too hard. I'm talking about all you have to do is breathe the air, and you're satisfied. You get full and you never have to eat. And you can survive that way, happy as a clam.” She took a sip of coffee, smoke dribbling from her nose as she swallowed. “That's what I've been working on.”

She pushed the pan of potatoes and bacon toward him, and August ate some even though Lisa had told him she would make him a sandwich when she got up from the barn. The potatoes were greasy and good. The bacon in it was little pieces of semi-charred saltiness. The onions were soft, translucent, and sweet. August ate, and wiped his hands on his jeans, and put his wrench on the table for his mother to see.

“Dad gave me a job,” he said. “For money.”

“Oh, well I'm proud to hear it. Did you negotiate a contract? Set a salary review option pending exemplary performance?”

“No, I'm just killing some cats.”

“I see. And this is your Excalibur?” She tinked the chrome-handled wrench with her fingernail.

“Yeah. It's a spanner wrench.”

She made a low whistle and coughed softly into the back of her hand. “It's a big job, Augie. Is he paying you upon completion or piecemeal?”

“I'm taking the tails. We're going to settle up at the end of the week.”

“Grisly work, son. That's the kind of work you stand a chance of bringing home with you, if you know what I mean.”

“The haymow smells like piss. It's getting real bad.”

“Your father. This is gruesome, even for him. Jesus.” She looked down blankly at the cards in front of her. “I keep forgetting where I'm at with this.” She gathered up her game, her nails scrabbling to pick the cards up off the Formica. “I can get only so far with solitaire before I get stumped. You ever win?”

“I never play.”

“I suppose it's a game for old women.”

“You're not old.”

“If I'm not, then I don't want to feel what old is like.”

“Are you ever going to come back to the new house?”

“You can tell him no, if you want. About the cats. You don't have to do it.”

“She's been staying over.”

“I found all Grandma's old quilts. They were in a trunk in the back closet. Beautiful things. She made them all. Some of them took her months. All of them hand stitched. I never had the patience. She used to make me sit there for hours with her learning the stitches. I'll show them to you if you want.”

“Sure. I should get to work now, though.”

“Next time, then.”

August ate a few more potatoes and then stood up.

“I wish you Godspeed,” his mother said, coaxing another cigarillo from the pack with her lips. “May your arrows fly true.”

“I don't have any arrows.”

“I know. It's just an old Indian saying.”

She blew smoke at him. “I don't care about the cats,” she said, smiling at him in such a way that her mouth didn't move and it was all in her eyes. “I look at you, and it's clear as day to me that he hasn't won.”

The barn was empty. His dad and Lisa were out rounding up the cows for milking. August put on his gloves and wedged the wrench down under his belt. He climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow.

Half-blind in the murk, holding his nose against the burning ammonia stench of cat piss, August crushed the skull of the first pale form that came sidling up to him. He got two more in quick succession—and then there was nothing but hissing from the rafters, green-gold eyes glowing and shifting among the hulking stacks of baled hay. August tried to give chase. He clambered over the bales, scratching his bare arms and filling his eyes and ears and nose with the dusty chaff of old hay. But the cats were always out of reach, darting and leaping from one stack to the next, climbing the joists to the rafters where they faded into the gloom. August imagined them up there, a seething furry mass, a foul clan of fanged wingless bats clinging to a cave roof. This was going to be harder than he had thought.

August inspected his kills. A full-sized calico and two skinny grays, thin and in bad shape, patches of bare skin showing through their matted fur. He pitched them down the hay chute and climbed after them. On ground level, he breathed deeply of the comparatively sweet manure-scented air, and fished his knife from his pocket. He picked up the first cat by the tail and severed it at the base, dropping the carcass on the cement with a wet thud. He dealt similarly with the other two cats, pitched them all in the conveyor trough, and went looking for a hammer. By the time he returned to the barn his father and Lisa had the cows driven in and stanchioned in their stalls. The radio was on, loud enough so Paul Harvey's disembodied voice could be heard over the muttering of the cows and the drone of the compressor.
I don't know about you all, but I have never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.

August nailed his three tails to a long pine board, and propped it up in the corner of the barn where it wouldn't get knocked over by cows milling in and out. He could hear his father doing something in the milk room. He passed Lisa on his way out of the barn. She was leaning on a shovel and spitting sunflower seeds into the dirt. She had on blue overalls and muck boots, and her frizzy blond hair was tamed into a ponytail that burst through the hole in the rear of her Seedco cap.

“Hi, August,” she said, scooping seeds out of her lower lip and thwacking them into the dirt at her feet. “You didn't come up to the house for lunch.”

“Yeah. I ate at the old house with my mom.”

“Oh, okay. I'm going to stick around tonight. I think I'll make some tacos for you guys for dinner. Sound good?”

August looked at her face, her round, constantly red cheeks. She called it rosacea, a skin condition. It made her seem to exist in a state of perpetual embarrassment. He wondered if she'd been teased about it at school.

She was only seven years older than him and had graduated from the high school last year. In her senior year August's father had hired her to help him with the milking, and she'd worked before school and after school and on weekends. August's father said that she worked harder than any hired man he'd ever had. Now that she was done with school she put in full days. She could drive a tractor with a harrow. She could muck out the barn. She could give the antibiotic shots to the cows—and when the calving season came she could plunge her hands in up to her wrists to help a difficult calf come bawling into the world.

“Crunchy shells or soft shells?” August said, knocking at the toes of his boots with the wrench.

“Soft?”

“I like crunchy.”

“Well, I'll see what you guys have in the cupboards, but I bought some soft ones already.”

“Flour or corn?”

“Flour, I think.”

“I like corn.” August spat at his feet, but his mouth was dry so the spit trailed out on his chin and he wiped at it with the back of his sleeve.

“I asked your dad what kind he wanted and he said it didn't matter.”

“He likes the crunchy shells too. Trust me. Do you make them with beans or without?”

Lisa hesitated for a moment and tugged at the brim of her cap. “Which do you prefer?” she said.

“Well, that depends.”

“I bought some black beans. I usually put some of those in. But I don't have to.”