Dog Run Moon (20 page)

If you live long enough, eventually there is a doubling back. In old age, there is a regression to childhood, of course. But before that, even, late middle age can become more like young adulthood than would seem possible. At age forty-eight, Lauren was again in the habit of going to the Longbranch on Friday nights. It actually wasn't called the Longbranch anymore but its new name never registered with Lauren, as she was now part of the demographic that mainly knew things by what they used to be, rather than what they actually were.

She drank whiskey and ginger ale, and sat with her back to the bar watching the dance floor. Occasionally, drunks would ask her to dance, and she'd shake them off silently. Sometimes, more rarely, nondrunks would ask her to dance and she'd turn them down as well. She met Manny there one night. The bar was full, and he came stumbling through the crowd, cane in one hand, sloshing drink in the other. As he was making his way past, the stool next to her became vacant, and, simple as that, he lurched himself onto it and into her life. Something was obviously wrong with his legs, and he had a hard time getting up on the stool. His cane whacked her shins. He nearly spilled his drink on her, and he was cursing. When he got settled, he turned to her, hanging his cane by the crook from the bar top.

“No,” he said. “Don't even ask. I will not dance with you.” Then he turned away from her and began drinking. She had to laugh, despite herself.

Many drinks later, they did dance, slowly. He was without his cane, so she had to hold him upright, although by then she was none too steady herself.

That night, he'd told her he had nerve damage from taking shrapnel in Vietnam. A few months later, after they'd gone to the courthouse and signed the papers, he admitted he'd never even been to Vietnam. His number never got picked. What he had was multiple sclerosis. He could look forward to the continued degeneration of his body on a timeline and severity scale known only to the disease itself. He might remain more or less as he was for years, or, over the course of a few months, devolve into a complete invalid.

Lauren quit the veterinary clinic and took the night custodian position at the high school. The pay was similar but the health benefits were much better. She missed the animals and the normal hours. Getting to work as the sun was going down was disorienting, but it did mean that she could sleep most of the day when Manny was awake, which turned out to be good. She'd moved in with him, his modular home on the windswept bench on the west side of the river. He'd gotten the cattle a few months before his MS diagnosis. It had been getting increasing hard for him to take care of their feed and water, and he had been on the verge of selling them before he met Lauren. Now that he had her, he decided to keep them.

Manny clung to the cane for as long as possible before succumbing to the wheelchair, and, when this transition finally came, it was not pleasant. Lauren lay a sheet of plywood down on the front steps for a ramp so he could come in and out on his own. When it was warm, he'd roll outside to drink in the front yard. When it was cold, he'd stay inside and drink with the TV on mute while Lauren slept. During the week things between them were bearable. They saw each other for one or two hours at best. On weekends, though, it was different. He'd yell for her to bring him more ice for his drink or change the radio station or to adjust the volume of the TV. In nice weather, he'd be outside rolling around, drinking Lauder's scotch from a travel mug, shouting out things that needed her attention.

“Come out and look at the steer with the white on its face. Is there something wrong with his hoof? Come here and look at the corner of the foundation here. Is that a crack? The mailbox post is tipping a little to the left. The next big wind, and the thing is going to fall right over. You need to get out here and shore it up or our mail is going to get scattered all over the damn countryside. Goddamnit, Lauren, I need you to keep this place from crumbling into the dust. I'm counting on you here.”

Occasionally, when Manny was especially far gone, and she was helping him into the bath or onto the couch or bed, he'd become enraged and lash out at her. Once, he'd connected, a hard, closed fist to her eye, and she'd seen an explosion of white sparks and then she'd dropped him, and left him, on the floor of the bathroom. She went and sat in the kitchen with a bag of frozen peas on her swelling eye, trying to ignore him as his angry screams turned to sobs, the first of their kind she'd ever heard.

In the summer months, Lauren began taking small road trips on the weekends. She'd load up the truck with a cooler and an inflatable mattress and a tarp and head out. She went to the Bighorn Canyon and then over to the Little Bighorn Battlefield monument. She went to the Lewis & Clark Caverns and took a candlelit tour, the hanging mineral formations breaking and sending the flickering candles' glow in a million different directions. Manny didn't like her to be gone, but there was nothing he could do to stop her. And even he realized that when she left for the weekend she was generally in good spirits for the rest of the week when she got back.

On one of the last nice weekends in October, Lauren packed up and headed to Butte. She wanted to see the Berkeley Pit and walk around the old town to see the crumbling copper-king mansions. It was a beautiful weekend. She camped one night and then, on the second night, sprung for a room at the Finlan Hotel with its ornate, high-ceilinged lobby, the chandeliers and wall accents made of pure, polished copper. The room was pretty and had a clawfoot tub, and she soaked until the water began to cool, and then she drained and refilled the tub and soaked some more. She had a steak at the Cavalier Lounge and drank a dirty martini. She walked around town some more at night so she could see the neon bar lights, and, way up on the hillside, the white glow of the ninety-foot-tall Our Lady of the Rockies statue.

Sunday morning, she woke up late and took her time getting back. She stopped more than she needed to—for coffee, for water, for the bathroom, for gum. Despite all this, she still made it home before dark. She pulled into the driveway as the sun was getting ready to set. The cattle had come to the edge of the fence and were looking at her as she sat in the truck, taking deep breaths, trying to retain, for a little while longer, that good, carefree, weekend-away feeling. She got her bag and went inside. Usually when she returned she found the kitchen a disaster area of dirty dishes and empty soup cans and beer bottles and puddles from dropped ice cubes. Upon hearing her open the door, Manny would begin shouting about something that needed her attention and she would set her bag down, square her shoulders, and get started cleaning things up. Today, however, the house was quiet, the TV off. There was only one empty soup can in the sink and Manny was nowhere to be seen. She went to the back porch to see if he was outside smoking, but he wasn't there either.

Eventually she spotted him, and she knew immediately. He'd wheeled himself out to the far corner of the pasture and his back was to the house. There was a turkey vulture resting on his shoulder like some hideous overgrown parrot. From a distance, it looked like the bird was whispering a secret into his ear. When she came closer she saw that the blast from the shotgun in his lap had removed the part of his head where his ear would have been and the bird was doing something there altogether different.

With Manny gone, once again her life resumed its simple course, dinner with wine, magazines on the table. She stopped the weekend trips.

She decided to sell the steers. She'd made a call and set up a time for a livestock truck to come and take them away. The day before its arrival, she'd come home to find that they'd broken out. It was early morning, and she was tired after a long day. She saw the fence was down and the cattle were gone and she decided to go inside and sleep for a few hours until it was light enough to see, and then she would go out and round them up.

She lay down with her clothes on, and was awakened a short time later by pounding on the door. It was just past dawn, the mountains still black, the pasture streaked with gray light. Manny's son, Jason, was at the door, his long hair tangled, eyes shot with red, looking like he hadn't slept in a long time. His black shepherd dog sat on the steps staring at her more directly than any natural-born dog would dare. She hadn't seen him since Manny's funeral. He'd spent the whole service eyeing her murderously.

Jason was holding a long section of vinyl house siding in his hand. When she opened the door he waved it in her face.

“See? Look at this. You see this? I'm watching TV and I come out to see your goddamn loose animals tearing up my lawn, rubbing themselves against my house. This is Timber Tek siding. The best they make. It's made to look like wood. You see that? That's simulated wood grain right there. You don't get that unless you pay extra. I paid extra for the wood grain, and now you are going to pay to get everything put back just the way it was.”

He kept ranting. She was having a hard time following. Something about court-appointed attorneys and the invalidation of wills composed while incompetent. His words were running together, and he repeatedly wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. And then, he flung the piece of siding at her and retreated a few steps. He had one hand raised in the air, his index finger up and pointing at the sky.

“Get your house in order,” he screamed. “Or, so help me god, one more of those shitting animals steps on my property and I'll shoot it dead and drag it to your doorstep.” He turned and stomped off the porch, the shepherd dog at his heels.

The livestock truck was scheduled to show up the next day, and right then she decided that she was going to call and cancel. Lauren put on her boots and set out across the pasture to retrieve her cattle. An hour later, she had them back in the enclosure and she mended the break in the fence. Splicing the wire together in the first of what would be many fixes. While she worked, she thought of each person she'd known in this world who had died or left and she tried to put them on a scale against the people she still knew who were still alive and in her life. Never had finding a balance seemed more desperate.

The Reds stood, flies blowing around their flanks, seemingly as happy to be fenced in as they were to be roaming free. “That's enough of that,” she said to them. “I don't expect anymore of that out of you lot.”

Wind and loneliness, interminable fatigue, and broken trees. Also, animals that needed to be fed. The same world that wanted to steamroll you also contained goats bleating their hunger, eggs that would go to waste if they weren't gathered, cattle that would run wild if they weren't contained. Lauren watered. She milked. She grained. She gathered. She collected all the splintered pieces of her trees and doused them with kerosene in her burn barrel. She tossed in a match, and there was a concussive whump as the pines caught fire, and she didn't even stand there for one second to watch them burn.

Winter came creeping down from the north, frosting the hill pines, taking up residence in her hands. She swallowed four ibuprofen every morning. In the long evenings, she sat at the kitchen table, soaking her stiff fingers in a bowl of hot water. Sometimes, before night fell, she could see Jason's shepherd dog padding across the snow-blown field between their houses.

The wind picked pieces of her house and sent them spinning out into the drifts. A shingle here, a section of trim there, a blue sliver of siding, piercing a backdrop of pure white.

There was a storm that lasted for three days. Her road was drifted shut and all night she lay awake, listening to the house shift and creak under the weight of the snow.

When the storm broke she emerged, a brilliant sunny morning, the light frantic with nowhere to settle. The cattle sensed her coming. They shifted, sleep-eyed, red coats made piebald with matted ice and snow. The goats sprang from their shelter, kicking through the fluff—in disgust or delight, she couldn't tell. A cat appeared from behind a hay bale. It slunk, weightless, toward her, and sat still, allowing her to rub its ears clumsily with her gloved hands. One of her roosters let loose, softly at first, as if clearing his throat, checking his tone, then louder, a raucous crowing that seemed as clear and timeless an affirmation as one might ever expect to hear. The storm was over, a clear dawn. Lauren had to laugh. Roosters, like males of other species, seemed to have a knack for stating the obvious.

Lauren quit her job at the school. She was sick of working nights. It had been fine when she'd needed to avoid Manny, but now it felt like she was starting to exist on some strange dark planet, conjoined maybe but ever separate from the rest of the daytime world. She wanted to sleep at night like a normal animal.

She got a job at the Frontier assisted-living facility and was somewhat surprised to find out that she loved it. The residents could be cranky, but most of the time they were happy and wanted to talk to whomever they could, even if it was just her, the janitor, emptying the trash cans in their rooms or shaking out their rugs. She had one old gentleman who liked her to sit for a few moments and listen to music with him. He had a record player and the scratchy songs were ones she vaguely remembered her mother listening to on the AM radio in the kitchen.

“If I was a little bit more spry, I'd ask you to dance, young lady,” he'd say. “You wouldn't be able to chase me off with a stick.” He was in a wheelchair, his legs atrophied to pipe cleaners. “Well,” Lauren said. “Probably for the best. I'm not much of a dancer, anyway. I just like to listen.”

“We make quite a pair then,” he said giving a phlegmy laugh. “The last of the great listeners.”

Sometimes Lauren had to clean rooms whose former occupants would never be returning. Often no one would come to claim the resident's belongings, and she would be charged with bagging up clothes for donation. She sometimes thought working at Frontier was the best thing she'd ever done, but this, the handling of remains, she didn't like. She didn't like the idea that someone would have to come along and sift through the pieces of her life and decide what could be donated and what was trash. Maybe this is part of why people had kids, so, in the end, at least it wouldn't be strangers rifling through their belongings. She wanted everything she owned to precede her into death. She wanted to pass out of this world with nothing much more than a pair of comfortable wool socks, broken-in jeans, a thick flannel shirt. Maybe it was hard to arrange the particulars of your dying, but all things being equal, she'd like to go on to her eternal rest in her work clothes, all her faculties intact until the very end. She thought maybe she should start throwing things away.