Dogfight (18 page)

I am standing in my own yard, barefoot, pressing my toes into the grass, smoking a cigarette. It is warm for February. In the spring and summer, I will push a lawn mower for them or cut back overgrown hedges, but mostly I just watch them, watch their children flashing back and forth and shout to them across the street. There are cutoff shorts today, seeing the light for the first time in months, and white knees. Sometimes there are cookies. What I like most of all is to
wake up late on Sunday and lie in bed and listen to them a while before getting up and going outside. Their voices, like rain on windows, masks the silence that is in my house. But it never rains on Sundays.

“It's almost noon, Wiley,” Gin says. “You lazy white boy.”

She sends a Frisbee wobbling across the street into my yard, and her son, Paul, chases after it without looking for cars. For the first few months, my heart stopped when I saw something like that, one of the children breaking alone into the street, but I relaxed over time. No one ever drives to our dead end.

Gin catches Paul before he can reach the Frisbee and lifts him, cocks her hip, and sits him there. She is pretty, going ever so slightly to fat but in a good way, in the way that her son is still soft and fleshy. She and Paul have the same wheat blond hair.

“Great day,” I say, blowing smoke. “I almost feel like exercising.”

She laughs and lets Paul down and he runs over to collect the Frisbee, orange with Day-Glo lime letters that say
“R U SERIOUS.”

“You need a haircut,” she says.

“You think?” I say, pushing my hair back from my forehead, where it is too long, and letting it fall over my eyes. “I thought I had a sort of Hollywood thing going.”

“Yeah, that's right,” she says. “You and Johnny Depp all the way to the bank.”

I flex my fingers at Paul, making what I think is a catching motion, and he winds up and throws, missing me wildly. The Frisbee lands on its side and goes rolling back across the street. Ashlynn sends one of her twin girls to bring it back and the twin—I can never tell them apart—meets Paul in the street and hands it over, shyly, as if passing him a love letter. Both of them are embarrassed.

Gin says, “Come by tomorrow about six and I'll neaten it up for you.”

“You're the boss,” I say.

It is a quiet morning. Voices matching the thin winter sunlight. Widow Friar has not come out yet with her boisterous daughter
Tammy, the oldest of the children on Cottonstocking. A light breeze pushes leaves and makes my smoke dance.

“You're coming tonight, right?” Gin says. She already knows the answer.

Every Sunday night one of us hosts a potluck. I work the barbecue, pretending I don't speak the language of the kitchen, hamming up my clumsiness there for the benefit of my neighbors. For my birthday, they gave me a “Kiss the Cook” apron and we wound up red-wine drunk, me with perfect lip-shaped kisses on my cheeks and neck and forehead. They stopped between each kiss to reapply plum-colored lipstick so it would show.

Rachel and Macy are coming up the sidewalk toward us and Macy is talking rapidly, moving her hands for emphasis, twisting one around the other, as if casting a spell. She can't be more than three feet tall, twelve inches for each year of her life. I am constantly surprised that something that small can, well, can think. I wonder how her eyes see the world. I found a battered quarter in the street the other day and gave it to her, and she told me that she loved me. Just like that.

Her mother is taller than most men, maybe six-two, with boyishly short hair and real shoulders. Length is her crowning feature, reedy legs and long, slender arms. Narrow wrists. These combine to make her motion a sort of wonderful, mesmerizing slink. Rachel teaches geometry at the same parochial high school where I am a teacher of Latin and Greek. I often see her in the hall, passing the little window in my classroom door, mostly just her chin and slim neck because of her height.

My students repeat after me,
“Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.”

Sometimes, Richard Davies, the school guidance counselor, and I will sit on the iron benches in the school courtyard and watch Rachel in her classroom, squirrels perched on her windowsill eating acorns. I like Richard because he doesn't care enough about his job to worry
about losing it. I once overheard him tell fretful parents, “Your daughter has some serious fucking problems.”

I watch Rachel, watch her moving back and forth in front of the blackboard, stretching on tiptoe to pull down the screen for the overhead projector or using a yardstick to draw perfect equilateral triangles. Her face lighting in response to something a student has said. Richard elbows me and says, “How would you like to get her in the bag?” or “Imagine those legs around your back.” And I want to tell him that I have had her in my arms, that I have kissed those shoulders. I don't tell him, because in the end nothing happened, not really.

I had walked Rachel home from one of Widow Friar's potlucks, and we had been drinking. As we were saying good night in front of her house, all of the lights on the street went out simultaneously, windows going black, streetlights blinking off, soaking us in darkness. We discovered later that a branch had fallen across one of the transformer lines, shutting down our whole area, but at the time it seemed ominous and frightening and full of strange magic, both of us jumping and putting our arms around each other. We laughed but didn't let go right away. She invited me in and we talked for a long time and we kissed a different kiss from my birthday. But I heard her daughter down the hall, heard Macy or maybe I just thought I did, heard her call to her mother through her sleep. I couldn't go any farther.

Now, Rachel crouches next to her daughter and both of them look at the sky. She has an arm around Macy's back and they are talking, softly. She turns to Gin and me and says, “What do y'all think those clouds look like? We think seahorses.”

The clouds are low and compact, each one separate and identifiable, white, like clouds at the beach. They aren't bruised thunder-heads, but away from the ocean and the sand, they are somehow threatening. They look painted on.

“What about ships?” I say. “The Aegean fleet sailing to Troy for Helen's love.”

Rachel and Macy frown. Gin kicks me, playfully, in the ankle and says, “You know, I always thought Latin teachers were jackasses but I had high hopes for you.”

Rachel covers her daughter's ears and Macy puts her hands on top of her mother's. She doesn't try to pry Rachel's hands away, just curves her fingers around them, content with her mother's hands softly on her face, wind, I imagine, from the cup of palms, rushing in her ears like the roar of ocean in a seashell.

“Watch your fucking mouth,” Rachel says. She winks at me.

I cross the street to them, extending my hand to Macy.

“Hello, Madame, may I have this dance,” I say in an exaggerated French accent, kneeling, making myself her height, arranging my arms as if I am already holding her.

“No,” she says, pressing herself against her mother, but when I make a heartbroken face, pulling my lips down, squinting as if I might cry, she adds, “I can do a summer so,” and brightens in apology. She has already learned the effect of batting her eyelashes.

“A somersault,” Rachel says, clarifying. “Show the crazy man what you can do, baby.”

Macy steps into the grass, bends, lowering her head to the ground, balancing with her hands, her dress falling up around her shoulders, and falls to one side. We all applaud and Macy just lies on the damp grass, one arm flung over her eyes dramatically as if her performance has left her spent. Her smile is creeping out from beneath that soft forearm.

A door slams behind us. We turn and see Widow Friar coming out, leading a man, shyly, by the hand. He is rawboned and crew cut. All of the women begin hooting and catcalling, and the man just stands by the Widow's car, embarrassed but happy, waiting for her to unlock the passenger door, rubbing the top of his head. Those are not bad shoes to be in, all of that attention lavished on you. For an instant, I am envious.

Driving past us, Widow Friar leans out of the window and says, “I always had a thing for soldiers.”

“You whore,” yells Gin and right at that moment, the wind swirls up, whipping through the big oak, making the branches cast off wild shadows and streaks of light, as if the tree and the street itself were laughing with us.

I am standing in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my bathroom door, getting ready for the party. I am naked and my hair is still wet, slicked back. In the reflection, I can see six steaks on three Styrofoam trays sitting on the back of the toilet, bleeding watery blood. I am, as usual, bringing the grill fare but I didn't take the steaks out of the freezer soon enough and thought that maybe in the heat and steam of the shower they would thaw faster in here. My khakis and shirt are hanging on the towel rack behind me. I can see a green dry-cleaning tag still pinned into the collar but I decide to leave it in. I will let one of the ladies discover it and take it out for me. I will let them think I can't take care of myself.

I sometimes think that I'm not much of a teacher, that I worry too much that the students won't think I'm suitably impressive. That I spend too much time looking at the pretty young girls, the girls that have to be reminded to button their blouses higher up, wondering if they find me attractive.

I tell my students stories to make the dry words more lively. If I had a time machine, I say, and could only use it once, I would slip back to Thebes, as quick and invisible as thought, at the exact moment that Croesus asked Solon to tell him the name of the happiest man in the world. Croesus expected the answer to be himself, but it wasn't. Solon said that the happiest man was an Athenian who had married young, seen the healthy births of his children and his children's children, and had died honorably, his heart empty of regret, in defense of his home. I can picture Croesus, brow knitted with derision. How can a dead man be happier than a king? Who is the second happiest then? The second happiest men, Solon told him, were two brothers who yoked themselves to an oxcart and pulled their mother five miles over rough country to a religious festival, because
the oxen hadn't been brought in from the fields soon enough. In her gratitude, their mother prayed that the gods grant her sons the greatest blessing that men can have. And her prayer was answered, the gods causing the brothers to fall into a peaceful sleep, the deepest sleep, and never woke again. I would like very much to see the look on Croesus's face, there in his throne room, dusty sunlight slanting in. I can imagine it, his mouth and eyes going slack, see it as if he were in the classroom with me, proud smile, fading to bewilderment, then finally, as Solon's meaning creeps over him, to terror.

I finish dressing and go outside, down the steps, watching my feet in the dark. Halfway across the street, I'm nearly run down by Tammy, the Widow's daughter, on her bicycle. She flashes by in front of me, a blur, all motion, and skids to a stop at the dead end, kicking up gravel. Though it is the wrong time of year, there are fireflies swirling in the bushes behind her. Tammy is eleven years old, maybe twelve. She rides by again, this time behind, close enough that I can feel the wind in her wake, then circles me once, like a motorcycle gang, before standing in the pedals and biking up the street the other way.

“Shouldn't you be at Rachel's?” I say. Tammy baby-sits for Rachel on Sunday nights.

Without looking back, Tammy gives me the finger. Everything looks damp in the moonlight and the plastic glow of the street lamps. I think of leaving Rachel's house the night of our kiss and stopping to look in on Macy, half-covered, immaculately restful. A Popeye night-light in the wall. I touched her back and could feel her heartbeat. Her body was soft with sleep and her eyes were closed, lids trembling, knowing, even in her sleep and dreams, that her mother would come.

I can hear the party before I get there, music rolling out into the street. Gin's silhouette dances past the window holding a glass in either hand. The steaks are in a plastic grocery bag that swings against my leg when I walk. I just knock and open the door and someone says, “The meat is here.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I say.

Gin puts her arm carefully around my neck, holding her hand away because of the glass, and kisses my cheek. The Widow is on the couch, shoeless, ankles crossed, in sheer black stockings and a skirt. Ashlynn takes the steaks into the kitchen, her hair, down tonight but crinkled a bit from today's braid, floating out behind her, and returns with a glass of wine for me.

“We were just talking about you,” she says. “When you were arrested for writing a bad check and all of us went down there to get you.

“You looked so pathetic in those little jail-issue flip-flops,” the Widow interrupts, starting to laugh again. Obviously, they have already been laughing about this.

“And Gin started crying when she saw you looking all hangdog,” Ashlynn says.

“The single worst day of my life,” I say.

Candles are burning in the place of electric light. There are maybe twenty of them, the thick, cylindrical kind, some white, some cream-colored, sitting in saucers. They smell good. A small fish tank is bubbling on the mantle, and I walk over and tap the glass. There are two fish and they swim up to the side.

“I need to find you all something else to talk about,” I say, grinning, pleased.

“But sweet little thang,” Gin says, “you're my pride and joy.”

“That's a song,” I say.

“Sit down, cowboy,” she says, pushing me into an armchair. We sit around the coffee table and eat the Gouda and crackers that Widow Friar has brought and pass the bottle of wine. Ashlynn has to go to the kitchen for another bottle. I ask where Rachel is and am answered with a community shrug and the talk turns back to their children and to movies and to me. I have been present for these talks before, their voices rising, quickening with excitement, as if telling secrets, as if discussing news from another planet. Paul has been fighting at day care. Gin tells us this with an undertone of pride.
He has, it seems, been winning. Tammy has been caught smoking. The Wolfe twins, Ashlynn's girls, who are eight and a half, are perfect angels, the Widow says, when compared with Tammy. A certain male heartthrob is playing a vampire in his new movie and everyone is worried about covering him with makeup for the part.