“Nice-looking dog.” She drew near the stout pen that contained a Catahoula wild-hog dog, an animal so baleful and maudlin in its pen as to appear comic, though less so when it was tearing apart a wild pig.
“You might say that.” Crabb drew closer during his favorite expression. Along with the deodorant he smelled, as always, of peanuts, which he was wont to describe as “nature’s perfect food.”
Crabb was known widely around the countryside as a man who had wrecked three pickups while shelling peanuts and drinking beer at top speed. He was also a deviate with freak hots for little girls. Her own memory of his sickness was more funny than traumatic. They had been about eleven, she and her cousin Marcia from Virginia, and it must have been right after church on Sunday because they were in dresses. At the far end of the plantation’s quail pen Julip had a setter pup on a tether and the pup was pointing the penned quail. Jim Crabb, who was about sixteen at the time and was cleaning the pen, called the girls “little bitches,” at which point Marcia mooned him.
As Julip only realized that moment in the trailer yard, Marcia’s moon waved a red flag. Jim Crabb came out of the pen and walked them over behind a huge live oak where he offered Marcia a dollar to do it again, only close up this time. Marcia didn’t need a dollar, her parents were well off, but she reenacted her moon, only jumping away when Crabb touched her bare bottom. Julip was teaching the pup to sit and heel and hadn’t been particularly interested until Crabb offered to show them how a man “did it to himself.” She wasn’t sure she would have laughed at the sight if Marcia hadn’t set the pace. Poor Jim Crabb lay on the ground with his eyes squeezed shut, pulling at himself mightily. Marcia told him to hurry up because they didn’t have all day. The puppy licked his face which broke his concentration and his reddish noodle began to shrink. Marcia taunted him about his disappearing “dickybird” and he offered another dollar for Marcia to stand over his head. Julip noted this brought him to instant life again, but as he was shooting his stuff all over the place Bobby showed up, took in the scene, then ran off yelling for Dad, which turned it into a real bad day for Jim Crabb. Dad came running from the house and out past the trailer, where he cornered Crabb, slapped him silly, and wedged him into a Sky Kennel, of all places, for a trip to the sheriff.
Only now in the trailer yard did the whole matter sadden her a bit, and that was because of her mother’s reaction, which was both sententious and oblique. “Love is a beautiful thing for when you are eighteen the body is sacred I pray this doesn’t scar you this insane boy should be locked up forever,” she droned on, an open recipe book before her, glancing at the book during her blather. Julip and Marcia giggled and Julip got slapped. Now as she headed for the trailer steps she wished she was religious so she could ask God who was more pathetic, her mother or Jim Crabb.
Crabb, in fact, was breathing down her neck as she opened the door. “Back off, you fucking pervert,” she yelled, and he tripped off the stoop in surprise.
“I’m changed,” he said, picking himself up quickly. “I’m a normal human. I got a diploma from Social Services in Tallahassee.”
She listened to him with moderate interest in the kitchen of the trailer as she drank a glass of funky water. His diplomas were from courses in “anger management” and a two-year-long effort by psychologists to reeducate his sexual tastes. She continued to listen as she entered the trailer bedroom to lift up the linoleum and find Bobby’s bait box. But when she opened the door the wind left her and she drew her breath in sharply. The entire room, both walls and ceiling, had been papered solid with photos from Hustler and other sex magazines: photos of gynecological intensity, countless ladies you could see well inside of, an abattoir assembly line of organs.
“Not much mystery hereabouts.” She laughed, gathering herself and stooping to the sheet of florid linoleum that covered the opening to the secret compartment she and Bobby had devised to hide the wild piglet.
“What do you mean by ‘mystery’?” Crabb asked, kneeling to watch her fetch the bait box out of the hole. The piglet’s food and water dishes were still there from over seven years ago. Her eyes began to mist at the memory that this precious animal had been taken from her because her mother thought pigs smelled like tooth decay.
*
Anticipating the Tallahassee rush-hour traffic, Julip decided against driving the two hours back to Raiford and opted for the idea of getting up early to make the morning visiting hours. She pulled off near a boat launch on Lake Jackson and took her diary and volume of Emily Dickinson out on the dock, slipping off her sandals to trail her feet in the water, staring at the bass minnows darting through the peppergrass.
She intended to jot down a plan of action in her diary but the choices were limited and obvious: see Bobby’s forensic psychologist, go to Key West and get the victims to agree, get the lawyer to reopen the case, get Bobby to admit he was crazy. The prosecutor might be easy because he had thought Bobby nuts for refusing to accept the fact that he was nuts in the first place. The judge in Key West (there was no jury) had several times referred to Bobby as “Galahad,” spelling it out for the puzzled court reporter before doling out seven to ten years, the minimum under the conditions which involved premeditation. The not so subtle and inadmissible factor was that if you really intended to kill someone, you didn’t shoot them repeatedly below the crotch with .22 shorts — a caliber, however, that can sometimes be fatal elsewhere on the body, especially the head. The languid court-appointed attorney had frequently pointed out that if Bobby had meant to kill the three men he would have used his .270 Weatherby, his Remington 30.06 or even his 12-gauge semiautomatic duck-hunting shotgun. There was a lackadaisical attempt among the defense lawyer, prosecutor, and judge to get out of the impasse but it was made impossible by Bobby, who said he would shoot the men again if they didn’t behave. The judge had no choice but to mete out the sentence and head for the golf course, where on the seventh tee he would slice his shot while meditating on the berserk hormones of the young. At Duke Law School, he thought, there should have been a course called Love, Death, and Greed 101 which would include the dope, alcohol, and loneliness that fed the implacable machinery.
Sitting on the dock, Julip saw it all as “old business,” the kind of thing her student council a few years back would file away with the crepe paper expenses for the school dance. The point now was to be as firm and methodical as you were when you started a pup on live quail or pigeons.
She looked down at her feet in the water to check for possible waterborne monsters, pulling up her skirt to sun her thighs. She opened her dog-eared Emily Dickinson, actually chewed on by a pup, to a poem she loved but didn’t really understand — not to say that anyone did.
Wild Nights — Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile — the Winds —
To a Heart in port —
Done with the Compass —
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden —
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor — Tonight —
In Thee!
Far out in the lake a bass boat approached and she began to think of Johnny, the first love of her life, whom she now admitted to herself had been a terminal nitwit. She turned as a mid-sized blacksnake wiggled through the cattails. In the fall and spring of her junior year of high school she and Johnny were inseparable, and when she went south with her family for the late fall and winter they wrote daily, though his letters were mostly about milk prices, weather, and basketball. He lived with a brother, Kurt, and his parents on a large dairy farm a few miles down the gravel road from their kennels.
Now the bass boat was coming in fast, in the manner of that peculiar breed, the bass fisherman, who her father felt was way down there on the hunting and fishing food chain with deer hunters, who in the north dressed in brilliant orange on the simple expedient of not shooting each other. While the guide backed the trailer to the
boat launch, the client came out on the dock to greet Julip, who had neglected to lower her skirt. She did not know that she had been glassed thoroughly from out on the lake with the expensive binoculars guides use to keep track of one another. It is a profession full of spite and secrecy.
“Helluva day,” the client said, standing beside and a little behind her. She glanced up as she pushed down her skirt, noting that his sporting clothes were new, and his chinos were wildly wrinkled around a small paunch that was destined to grow and grow despite the surge of hormones occasioned by a day’s fishing. She could tell, however, by his face that he wasn’t a bad sort, just that his mere presence in her problematical day bored the shit out of her.
“I want my mother,” she said blankly in answer to his weather report.
“Of course,” he said, startled and withdrawing back down the dock forever.
Though it wasn’t polite, “I want my mother” always got rid of them fast, along with “Are you my real dad?” — both of them suggested by her cousin Marcia, who had carried waywardness to an astounding level. Marcia had stopped through Ashland on April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough, with a Latin boyfriend, driving from Georgetown to Aspen in a Porsche for the late skiing, powered by cocaine and pills. They had gone into town for lunch, and when Marcia took off her sweater she revealed a T-shirt that said, “I Fucked a Republican and It Was Real Ugly.” Not the sort of thing one wore for lunch in Ashland, Wisconsin. And when Julip told her about the shooting incident and Bobby’s imprisonment — Marcia had been in Europe until recently — Marcia sobbed loudly, went into the bathroom, and vomited.
Back on the dock Julip figured she’d better call Bobby’s forensic psychologist to see what further hurdles might come from that quarter. She had met him briefly just before and during the trial and thought him kind and pleasant, though he hadn’t explained “deeply delusional” to her satisfaction. His name was Wiseman and he was evidently Jewish, though she had no clear idea what that meant, there not being any Jews on quail plantations and few in northern Wisconsin. But Wiseman had given her his home phone number in case she became overly distraught and needed to talk to him.
She lifted her feet to let them sun dry, catching sight again of the blacksnake in the reeds. Last night’s lawyer had a tongue as dry as a snake’s skin. Perhaps, she thought, she wasn’t repelled by either snakes or lawyers with dry tongues because they were just what they were, and she had always saved her energy for the main chance. Even Johnny, who had betrayed her, had been stored in a cool dark place. There had been a splendid summer and fall but after she left he had impregnated a girl she hated at a beer party. He was married in a snap of the fingers, in the fashion of the local German Catholics. It was all as sudden as the death of her father on a Minnesota roadside a year later, an apparent suicide according to her mother, whom Julip often thought of murdering. “He did himself in,” Margaret had said. His ashes were in a small oak box the kennel hand, Frank, had made lovingly for that purpose.
*
Julip checked into a motel in Tallahassee beyond her budget, avoiding the blushed smirk of a young desk clerk so fungoid she bet he was still cherry.
“The hot place to go is Dojo’s,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean? What’s a hot place?” She had decided on mild punishment.
“You know what I mean. Swinging. A good band.” His voice trailed off, the remnant of his presumption disappearing with the coldness of her stare.
“I’m a Christian, not a weirdo street slut, and I resent your bad manners. Perhaps I should talk to the manager.” She began tapping the room key hard against the counter as the blood filled his face.
“Please. I only had this job a few months.” All he wanted was to be a regular guy and he had gotten it wrong again.
“Relax. Just try not thinking about your pecker for a whole day. It’ll do wonders for your skin. Promise?”
“I promise.” Now she had shoved him into a higher zone of anxiety than he’d ever known, further confused by the wink she gave him as she walked away.
The trifle with the desk clerk, however, did nothing for her. Life’s struggles are not helped by flip victories, her teacher in the North had repeatedly told her, a prim young woman so upright that students loved rather than derided her. She was not as lovable, though, as the teacher in the South who was always trembling on the lip of nervous collapse and told Julip in a Wal-Mart parking lot that to ninety-nine out of one hundred men she would always be simply a piece of ass. The challenge for a girl was to find number one hundred. Sad to say, this beloved teacher had flown the coop to live with some New Agers out in Arizona. It was a little startling, on a warm March evening, also in the Wal-Mart parking lot, the night before Julip left with her family for the North, to have this teacher announce, “We are others.” When Julip questioned this notion in earnest, the teacher asked who the other inside her was that questioned herself. That added up to at least two. The teacher could count five more others for herself before she began weeping at the beauty of the cosmos above her in the early spring night. There was evidently a place in Arizona where this cosmos could be seen more clearly than in Georgia, so off the teacher went, abandoning her bookkeeper husband and her fourteen-year-old computer-junkie son, who barely noticed his mother’s absence.
The spring of Julip’s senior year had been truly dreadful — her season in hell, in fact. She took to drinking despite her father’s sodden example, smoked pot on the way to school, at lunch hour, and in the evening. She assumed a fresh and vulgar way of speaking. Her lost love Johnny became a “fucking dummy” and his child bride, who appeared to be constructed of Play-Doh and resembled Miss Piggy, became a “fucking pig.”
Julip’s teacher of the North took her aside several times to tell her that gender was not the central fact of life, and that she should subdue the Iago in her, a character Julip rather appreciated in Shakespeare class. The teacher had also advised her to search for her higher self in Emily Dickinson, Julip’s favorite writer. Sometimes she even did her hair like Emily, in those Empire curls at the temples. At times there is nothing quite so consoling as being misunderstood, and Emily Dickinson was the best possible example of this condition.
On the motel bed her problems dissolved in a piece of particularly shitty institutional art, a raised-brush-stroke rendition of a landscape in an uninvented country, including a big-eyed donkey staring out from a row of Lombardy poplars.
To Julip art was something you disappeared into, if only for a moment. When she was a child a wealthy man had given her father Audubon’s grouse and woodcock prints and she forever strained after the hanging grapes with the ruffed grouse, or merely sat in the shadowed stillness with the woodcock. Naive as it was, there is no response to art so genuine as the desire, the often heart-rending pull, to be within the work. Off the kitchen in a hall of the plantation house when she had been summoned, usually for punishment, by her mother, there had been two Edward Curtis prints that had troubled, mystified, attracted her: Two Whistles, his face powdered and a crow perched on his head, and Bear’s Belly, the Ankara medicine man cloaked in the skin of a bear. After being chided or spanked she wanted to hide within the bearskin robe of Bear’s Belly, having been drawn to the eyes of the man who promised an earth without the small-time bullshit of punishment. It was strange, she thought, that in Wisconsin Indians were subjected to abuse that far exceeded that of blacks in the South. Somehow, though, the message inherent in the memory of these two men was that it was important not to approach life with the attitude of a hurt child. It got you nowhere in life, she had decided, and it certainly was the way to ruin a potentially good bird dog during training. Life and bird dogs required a firm hand.
So she called Dr. Wiseman, who without hesitation invited her over to his home. On the way she uttered a pointless prayer against a repeat of her experience with the lawyer, then smiled when she thought of her first meeting with Charles, soon after her father’s passing. Charles had brought b
ack a headstrong male setter her father had sold him two years before. They went for a walk in the back forty in a piece of cover she knew held both woodcock and grouse. The setter’s name was Jack and he lazily worked an alder and dogwood thicket, pissing on five stumps in a row, then chasing a snowshoe rabbit, yelping in broadening circles, oblivious of Julip and Charles, who fairly bleated, “Come Jack, come to Daddy please, right now Jack.” When the dog ignored him, Charles began howling, “Jack, you motherfucker, I’m going to kick your ass,” which Jack disregarded in his pursuit of another rabbit.
Julip had sent Charles off to sit on a stump two hundred yards in the distance, then she knelt down in the path of the berserk dog, whose tongue had begun to loll as he caromed through the ferns and dense thickets. Finally Jack took notice of her low whistle and wandered over, flopping down in breathless exhaustion. She pinched his ear lightly to remind him of his bad behavior, then soothed him, rubbing his tummy until he regained his breath, at which point she drew a grouse and a woodcock wing from her coat pocket, passing them under his nose. Jack sniffed the wings and stood, his training and genetic destiny gradually occurring to him as a child at play looks up with delight to see the father’s car driving into the yard. She pointed out a thicket in the direction of Charles and whispered, “Where are the birds?” knowing that in the covert of dogwood and alder a grouse brood made its home. Jack pointed a young grouse which Julip flushed, then she sent him a quarter mile farther where he skidded to a stop near a swale. This time it was a woodcock, and she waved Charles over and they let the dog hold the point for a long time, rigid, elegant, his tail upraised, his head low with neck twisted to the strong scent of the bird, a nearly heraldic image.